Google Gives Up On Renewables - Eco Romantics Confront Reality

[maxparrish]

A turkey for the holidays:

http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Google-Gives-Up-On-Renewables.html

 

[laughing dog]

The entire analysis contained in the link conflates "expense" with "cost". If the cost of using fossil fuels included the environmental costs, then renewables may very well become cost-effective within the next 100 years or so.

 

[Nexus]

The entire analysis contained in the link conflates "expense" with "cost". If the cost of using fossil fuels included the environmental costs, then renewables may very well become cost-effective within the next 100 years or so.

Also I doubt they include the military spending that secures our access to oil.

 

[Bomb#20]

Also I doubt they include the military spending that secures our access to oil.

People keep saying things like that. Why do they believe in their theory? Oil is a fungible commodity. What secures our access to oil is our willingness to pay market price for it. It's not as though it was India's failure to travel to distant exotic lands and meet interesting exciting people and kill them that brought traffic in Mumbai to a standstill.

 

[barbos]

there was another thread about it somewhere.

also there is this thread http://talkfreethought.org/showthre...g-economically-competitive-the-New-York-Times

 

[untermensche]

The entire analysis contained in the link conflates "expense" with "cost". If the cost of using fossil fuels included the environmental costs, then renewables may very well become cost-effective within the next 100 years or so.

Also I doubt they include the military spending that secures our access to oil.

It doesn't even secure our access. It gives a few US corporations a position to profit and control a part of the oil trade.

It doesn't really change much for the average person.

It is money spent (trillions) simply to allow a few select corporations to prosper, in other words.

That was the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A government run social program to make a few select well connected corporations very rich.

 

[lpetrich]

A turkey for the holidays:

http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Google-Gives-Up-On-Renewables.html

Titled link: Google Gives Up On Renewables
That was three years ago.

barbos's titled link: Renewable energy becoming economically competitive -- the New York Times
noting Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels - NYTimes.com

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.

Those prices were made possible by generous subsidies that could soon diminish or expire, but recent analyses show that even without those subsidies, alternative energies can often compete with traditional sources.

maxparrish, who is laughing now?

 

[lpetrich]

The entire analysis contained in the link conflates "expense" with "cost". If the cost of using fossil fuels included the environmental costs, then renewables may very well become cost-effective within the next 100 years or so.

LD, what gives you that idea? That's VERY pessimistic, IMO.

It's already happening for electricity generation, and all that's needed is building it. As the technology gets better and better and more and more widely used, it gets cheaper and cheaper. That's what's called an economy of scale, and many technologies have followed that curve.

Since wind and solar energy are intermittent, an important component is storage, especially utility-scale storage, and various companies are working on improved technologies for that, like improved batteries.

Replacing petroleum is more difficult, but lots of people are working on alternatives.

It seems to me that if maxparrish can't stand get electricity generated by technologies that the environmentalists love, then he may eventually have to go off the grid and get his electricity from a diesel generator. Preferably running diesel fuel from gen-yoo-wine Texas crude.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Also I doubt they include the military spending that secures our access to oil.

People keep saying things like that. Why do they believe in their theory? Oil is a fungible commodity. What secures our access to oil is our willingness to pay market price for it. It's not as though it was India's failure to travel to distant exotic lands and meet interesting exciting people and kill them that brought traffic in Mumbai to a standstill.

Restricted access to Middle East oil makes oil being fungible cause the price to jump up quickly as one of the top three producers would be at risk.

 

[Bomb#20]

People keep saying things like that. Why do they believe in their theory? Oil is a fungible commodity. What secures our access to oil is our willingness to pay market price for it. It's not as though it was India's failure to travel to distant exotic lands and meet interesting exciting people and kill them that brought traffic in Mumbai to a standstill.

Restricted access to Middle East oil makes oil being fungible cause the price to jump up quickly as one of the top three producers would be at risk.

So who's going to restrict access to the oil? It's not as though Saddam or ISIL or whoever might have the oil in the absence of western intervention wouldn't sell it.

 

[maxparrish]

Titled link: Google Gives Up On Renewables
That was three years ago.

barbos's titled link: Renewable energy becoming economically competitive -- the New York Times
noting Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels - NYTimes.com

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.

Those prices were made possible by generous subsidies that could soon diminish or expire, but recent analyses show that even without those subsidies, alternative energies can often compete with traditional sources.

maxparrish, who is laughing now?

I am. Such hare footed, and red herring, trumpeting by greenies cannot fail to amuse. Turtle like readers may have actually read a good part of the Google teams analysis, based on the total national energy market and limiting factors. That is a different sort of consideration than some spot pricing in a few optimal markets where wind and solar might be feasible.

More importantly, the author let's the cat out of the bag near the end:

Still, the industries are not ready to give up on their government supports just yet.

Already, solar executives are looking to extend a 30 percent federal tax credit that is set to fall to 10 percent at the end of 2016. Wind professionals are seeking renewal of a production tax credit...

If that does not generate a knowing "economically competitive" smile, then one does not have a sense of humor.

 

[Axulus]

The entire analysis contained in the link conflates "expense" with "cost". If the cost of using fossil fuels included the environmental costs, then renewables may very well become cost-effective within the next 100 years or so.

What are those costs pegged at on a per unit basis?

- - - Updated - - -

The entire analysis contained in the link conflates "expense" with "cost". If the cost of using fossil fuels included the environmental costs, then renewables may very well become cost-effective within the next 100 years or so.

Also I doubt they include the military spending that secures our access to oil.

Since oil is rarely used to generate electricity, that is a moot point in this analysis. It's mostly natural gas and coal vs. other alternatives like wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, etc.

 

[maxparrish]

For those less amused, you might look at how the books are baked:

Lazard was hardly the first to bake the books on the economics of renewable generating technologies using the LCOE....

t means that the LCOE for renewable generation is or is likely to be lower in the near-term future than the “average” price of electricity provided by the electric power grid.

However, in 2010, Paul Joskow, the President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a paper showing how use of the LCOE to compare renewables and conventional power generating technologies “tends implicitly to overvalue intermittent generating technologies compared to dispatchable alternatives.”

Per Joskow:

This paper makes a very simple point regarding the proper methods for comparing the economic value of intermittent generating technologies (e.g. wind and solar) with the economic value of traditional dispatchable generating technologies (e.g. CCGT, coal, nuclear). I show that the prevailing approach that relies on comparisons of the ‘levelized cost’ per MWh supplied by different generating technologies, or any other measure of total life-cycle production costs per MWh supplied, is seriously flawed. It is flawed because it effectively treats all MWhs supplied as a homogeneous product governed by the law of one price. Specifically, traditional levelized cost comparisons fail to take account of the fact that the value (wholesale market price) of electricity supplied varies widely over the course of a typical year.

There is no homogenous price of electricity. On the contrary, the difference between the high and the low hourly prices over the course of a typical year can be up to four orders of magnitude, according to Joskow....

Wholesale electricity prices reach extremely high levels for a relatively small number of hours every year. Only power plants that can supply power during those hours can monetize those high prices. The revenue earned by selling power during these high-priced hours may make or break the profitability of investing in new generating plants. Failing to properly account “for output and prices during these critical hours will lead to incorrect economic evaluations of different generating technologies,” said Joskow....

and:

The problems with the LCOE are not limited to academic researchers. Indeed, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has concluded that the LCOE “can be misleading as a method to assess the economic competitiveness of various generation alternatives.”

In the most recent Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA began using the “levelized avoided cost of energy” (LACE) as an alternative to the LCOE for assessing the economic competitiveness of different generating technologies. The LACE metric estimates what it would have cost the grid to generate the electricity otherwise displaced by a new generation project.

The LCOE is like a bad line of code in a software program used to develop other software programs. It has dangerously skewed investors’ understanding of the economics of generating electricity from renewable energy resources. It has also had perverse and difficult to undo impacts on local, state and federal energy policies.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/william...ricity-renewable-energys-ticking-time-bomb/3/

 

[Testy Calibrate]

I am not sure if this is relevant to this thread or not but:
http://www.google.com/green/energy/investments/

 

[Axulus]

Also I doubt they include the military spending that secures our access to oil.

It doesn't even secure our access. It gives a few US corporations a position to profit and control a part of the oil trade.

It doesn't really change much for the average person.

It is money spent (trillions) simply to allow a few select corporations to prosper, in other words.

That was the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A government run social program to make a few select well connected corporations very rich.

Actually it hurts US corporations. The price of oil would jump if ME supplies were more unstable (not that they aren't already), allowing the US corps to rake in much more profit. You might want to actually spend a few minutes to analyze the situation.

 

[Axulus]

Restricted access to Middle East oil makes oil being fungible cause the price to jump up quickly as one of the top three producers would be at risk.

So who's going to restrict access to the oil? It's not as though Saddam or ISIL or whoever might have the oil in the absence of western intervention wouldn't sell it.

The costs I've read about with US military spending are more so along the lines of protection for tankers from pirates and protection of other assets from militants, etc. Subsidized security costs, in other words. You are right about the oil access, however. The oil will continue to flow no matter who controls it.

 

[Axulus]

People keep saying things like that. Why do they believe in their theory? Oil is a fungible commodity. What secures our access to oil is our willingness to pay market price for it. It's not as though it was India's failure to travel to distant exotic lands and meet interesting exciting people and kill them that brought traffic in Mumbai to a standstill.

Restricted access to Middle East oil makes oil being fungible cause the price to jump up quickly as one of the top three producers would be at risk.

Thus allowing the US oil corps to profit with the higher price, no? A higher price would also be a boon to oil service corps like Halliburton as their services would be in higher demand for new oil projects resulting from the higher price.

 

[dismal]

If we want to secure access to oil we should attack California.

Or do something crazy like let some private company build a pipeline to bring it here from Canada.

Very few Somali pirates in California and Canada.

 

[Togo]

There is no homogenous price of electricity. On the contrary, the difference between the high and the low hourly prices over the course of a typical year can be up to four orders of magnitude, according to Joskow....

But there is a homoenous, or relatively so, price of electricity. That's how we have a commodities market in electricty. That's the point of having a commodities market in electricity. The cost/value to a generating company may well fluctuate, because in real terms you either need more electrcity or you don't, and the demand fluctuates over time. But the market price is much smoother than that - precisely because people trade.

What the article is referring to is that electricity demand fluctuates a lot, but power stations work best when you don't keep on turning them off and on again. So quoting a levelled market price is misleading, because you end up spending more than that. You need capacity to meet peak demand. This is becoming more of a problem as we turn from coal and gas, which can be switched off and on comparatively easily, to nuclear and renewables, where it isn't so easy.

It's absolutely nothing to do with anyone 'baking' the books or trying to mislead anyone - it's just that this kind of thing matters more than it used to.

What this is supposed to do with the google teams analysis that changing electricty over to renewables is itself is not enough, and that we also need to look at other areas, is not clear to me.

 

[barbos]

More importantly, the author let's the cat out of the bag near the end:

Still, the industries are not ready to give up on their government supports just yet.

Already, solar executives are looking to extend a 30 percent federal tax credit that is set to fall to 10 percent at the end of 2016. Wind professionals are seeking renewal of a production tax credit...

If that does not generate a knowing "economically competitive" smile, then one does not have a sense of humor.

You do realize that 30% is not a large number?
What are you going to say when cost of solar drops 30% and it is no longer needs tax credits?
Point is, solar became competitive with coal for the first time. Before that it had not been competitive. Yes tax credits were included but they were not 1000%