alt Hacker News> an ideologically driven push for renewables
Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of these positions deserves to be called an ideology).
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Also, to add to the “ideology”: it is bad to rely on other countries for fossil or uranium fuels.
>Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity
Only if you don't include the huge cost of storage for when it isn't windy.
Chiming in as Australian with no context on European situation. AFAICT the key drivers of cost inflation are to do with reconfiguring the electric grid to transfer power efficiently and reliably from plants that produce renewable energy. However, the grid is set up to do so from non-renewable sources. And you want to do it while smoothly operating the network. This is extremely hard. Doing so quickly therefore elevates prices. That’s the rationale I could imagine being the case in EU markets.
more like "it's bad to fry the planet so we will destroy our economy for 0.001% impact while the real impacters continue to advance and leave us in the dust"
>> an ideologically driven push for renewables
> Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
The basics of economics are:
Yet you know all this as you are a professor of economics in the UK. So how comes that the UK has the highest industry KWh prices in Europe? There must be an absolutely fantastic opportunity to make money and investors should be like vultures grabbing new projects for renewables.Just the other day I read news that in Germany perfectly well functioning wind turbines are being turned down because they have reached the end of the phase of guaranteed KWh prices. So are the owners crazy and throwing money away? No, they simply do the business calculations and if the math doesn't play out, they simply remove them and build new ones with new subsidies.
The latest auction from the German gov for a new field in the baltic sea didn't even find one bidder.
China is doing lots of renewables but they calculate it down to the penny.
So yes, as you say "Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity". To generate yes. But you need lots of CAPEX to store it and to distribute it. And you can not work with a 95%ile. You need 100% in any developed economy.
Despite marginal cost pricing it not interesting for investors without subsidies.