LCOE—the "Levelized Cost of Energy"—explicitly ignores "reliability-related considerations" and is therefore a garbage metric for comparing the cost of different types of electricity.
Nice piece. It should be noted that Lazard, whose business model it to help get wind and solar projects financed, is the entity that promotes LCOE with it big splash every year.
Any resource planner/market analyst in the power supply space would not have a job long if they used LCOE in their analysis for making resource decisions, especially in todays world where generation reliability at high stress periods is such a premium.
Good points. The Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in also, as you touch on with "costs... increase with the percentage of solar and wind use." Another reason for diminishing returns are that the sunniest and windiest spots have mostly already been taken. And one more - the realization that turbulence downwind reduces the efficiency of any locations too close.
Also, I wonder how accurate the projected lifetimes are? And too many decommissioning cost projections leave the concrete base in the ground, which is completely unacceptable from an environmental viewpoint. And how does anyone calculate the cost of all the dead birds and whales?
And all for what? Less than a 10th of a degree global cooling?
Very good point. The Guardian, NYT, etc might as well argue that the "Mr. Fusion" Home Energy Reactor which transforms ordinary garbage into energy is the cheapest form of energy. Of course, Mr. Fusion comes from the movie Back to the Future which is a fantasy, very much like the ideal of “renewables.”
Nice piece. It should be noted that Lazard, whose business model it to help get wind and solar projects financed, is the entity that promotes LCOE with it big splash every year.
Any resource planner/market analyst in the power supply space would not have a job long if they used LCOE in their analysis for making resource decisions, especially in todays world where generation reliability at high stress periods is such a premium.
Good points. The Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in also, as you touch on with "costs... increase with the percentage of solar and wind use." Another reason for diminishing returns are that the sunniest and windiest spots have mostly already been taken. And one more - the realization that turbulence downwind reduces the efficiency of any locations too close.
Also, I wonder how accurate the projected lifetimes are? And too many decommissioning cost projections leave the concrete base in the ground, which is completely unacceptable from an environmental viewpoint. And how does anyone calculate the cost of all the dead birds and whales?
And all for what? Less than a 10th of a degree global cooling?
Very good point. The Guardian, NYT, etc might as well argue that the "Mr. Fusion" Home Energy Reactor which transforms ordinary garbage into energy is the cheapest form of energy. Of course, Mr. Fusion comes from the movie Back to the Future which is a fantasy, very much like the ideal of “renewables.”
The war on Diesel
https://open.substack.com/pub/profvictoria/p/the-war-on-diesel?r=bpwpi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false