The same people shitting all over solar and wind power are also climate change deniers along with advocating the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They are all seriously fucked up in the head and never to be trusted.
Tough break for fossil fuels.
www.popularmechanics.com
Even without subsidies, renewable energy is staying competitive with power from gas and coal
www.scientificamerican.com
Those sources are wrong because they don't account for solar and wind being part of a 24/7 system.
For example, in the second article, the LCOE is calculated as:
Lazard calculates an energy resource's levelized cost, or LCOE, by dividing a project's lifetime energy production by its cost.
That calculation is utter bullshit when you consider that electricity is needed 24 hours a day, every day. All it does is look at the cost of that power plant, not the cost of generating electricity 24/7. When you start calculating electrical production on the basis of a 24-hour day, all of a sudden solar and wind are completely duplicative and / or grotesquely unaffordable.
The way you need to calculate the TRUE cost of wind and solar is treat them as part of a larger generation system in which they are intermittent sources. That is, they generate electricity only part of the time. To do that you start with the nameplate capacity of the generation plant and multiply that by the plant's rated
capacity factor. The first is the amount of power the plant can generate maximum. The second is the amount, on average, that it actually generates over time.
Solar plants have capacity factors typically between 20 and 25%. Wind plants have a capacity factor, typically, between 30 and 40%.
For a solar plant, it doesn't generate at all when the sun is down. This means you need some alternative to supply power at night, on cloudy days, etc. If you want to try and do that with solar what you need is to install a minimum of FIVE (5) times the needed capacity in solar panels and then build, in addition 3 to 5 kw of storage for each kw of power generated and dispatched (used).
When you do that, the Lazard calculation suddenly makes solar ungodly expensive compared to every other means of generation.
The alternative is building a second, conventional, plant like a natural gas or diesel one that picks up the load when solar isn't available. That means you now are paying to build TWO power plants and run both part of the time.
Wind is little better. The same choices have to be made. Either you build in extra capacity and lots of storage or you build a second, duplicate plant.
THAT is why wind and solar are total losers for energy production. They are so unreliable as to require either an unaffordable amount of storage capacity or you build duplicate means of generation. With the latter, it's simply cheaper to not do wind and solar and just build the reliable, alternative plant.
The cheapest combination is nuclear backed by natural gas. Nuclear is your base loading generator as it has massive, huge, capacity and a capacity factor of 95 to 98%. This generates 70 to 80% of your electricity day in and day out, all day long. The other 20 to 30% is the variable load that fluctuates during each day. For that you build natural gas peaking plants that can come online or go offline fairly rapidly. They are flexible enough to meet that variable load without issues.
Solar and wind are total losers as generation sources. The most idiotic version is rooftop home solar. That is insanely inefficient and costly.
www.spinergie.com
www.ktbs.com
www.wind-watch.org
