Wind Costs: Cheaper than Coal. Wind Turbine Noise: You decide.
June 27, 2011
Video from an amateur videographer, filming at the foot of a giant turbine at the Stoney Corners Wind Farm, about an hour from my house.
The camera records, you decide. (you can skip to 30 seconds in..)
Meanwhile, yet more evidence that Renewables are not only viable, they are the best choice for consumers. The Michigan Public Service Commission has released a comparison of costs from renewable and conventional sources. The results? (levelized busbar costs..)
New Coal: $133/MWh
Wind: $101.78/MWh
Cheapest of all, blowing everything out of the water, energy efficiency at:$13.25 per MWh avoided
These results are typical across the country.
So, if you are a consumer in a large, midwestern, industrial state – your choice is now between energy efficiency, (the best investment you can make), cheap (and getting cheaper),clean, safe, 21st century energy, or expensive, (and getting more so) polluting 19th century energy.
So why are the Tea Party Windbaggers promoting their steam-powered time-trolley into the past?
Might have something to do with where they get their money…
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
June 27, 2011 at 7:11 am
I did a similar video a few years ago when my ex took me to see a wind farm that the company she worked for at the time had constructed. I know first hand that they are nowhere near as noisy as a coal power station (and I grew up in the Gippsland in Victoria, Aust, with a few of our biggest stations overlooking the town).
June 27, 2011 at 9:19 am
So, if you really believe that wind is cheaper than other sources of electricity, then do you also agree that the tax breaks and mandates that support wind and PV are now obsolete and can be abolished?
Naw, I didn’t think so. You don’t really believe it’s cheaper than coal, natural gas, etc., do you?
June 27, 2011 at 1:13 pm
daveburton,
Are you going to support the abolition of fossil-fuel subsidies? The problem is a lack of a level playing field. Fossil-fuels have external costs*, that aren’t included in the balance-sheet, while renewables don’t. I suspect that those pushing for renewables would love ALL subsidies to be abolished and for renewables to be treated fairly. The crazy thing is many politicos don’t want a level playing field. It’s hard to understand why, unless one considers their handouts from Peabody, Exxon, Koch, Chevron, Western Fuels etc.
Oops! Just look what Big Oil and Coal dragged in!
http://dirtyenergymoney.com/view.php?searchvalue=inhofe&search=1&type=search
* Extrenal costs like SMOG; CO2; mercury; water pollution etc. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html
“The largest U.S subsidies to fossil fuels are attributed to tax
breaks that aid foreign oil production, according to research released by ELI. The study, which reviewed fossil fuel and energy subsidies for Fiscal Years 2002-2008, reveals that the lion’s share of energy subsidies supported energy sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gases. Fossil fuels benefited from approximately $72 billion over the seven-year period, while subsidies for renewable fuels totaled only $29 billion.”
http://www.elistore.org/reports_detail.asp?ID=11358
I don’t know what the current situation is, perhaps you might enlighten us.
Sources please.
June 27, 2011 at 1:42 pm
the subsidy for wind is there primarily to level the playing field. It amounts to about a penny or 2 per kw/hr, maybe someone has the exact figure — not enough to overcome the difference in the numbers cited above, and remember, cost of wind is trending generally downward, and fuel costs are stable (zero) — while coal costs continue to increase, and will increase dramatically in the future, as I’ll show in a future video.
Moreover, coal shills tend to discount the loss of intellectual potential due to mercury in our children’s brains, for instance, as a cost of this form of energy. They consider it an “externality”. I don’t.
A recent harvard study showed that if the total impact costs of coal production, ie
coal mining, burning and ash causing health problems, premature death, lost productivity, damage to our environment, were taken into account, it would add another 17 cents per kw/hr to the price.
again, deniers don’t believe these are real costs. After all, they are born by our children, and screw those losers, right?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/full
June 27, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Thanks Greenman,
I was pretty certain there was a degree of bias in daveburton’s comment and of course it turns-out it was much worse than I suspected.
June 27, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Nukes are about 5 times safer than wind. 5 times more engineers die falling off wind turbines / TW of energy than have *ever* died across the whole history of nuclear power accidents, and that’s including Chernobyl’s almost deliberate sabotage of a dangerous old technology.
And how many people have died from Fukishima? No … really? *None* that I know of, and that area has now gained a nature reserve for however long it takes to become safe.
As with the DMZ in Korea, we could do with a few more nature reserves! (Although *of course* I don’t think this is the optimal way to do it, and *of course* I would prefer eco-tourism to fund the setting aside of vast tracts of attractive ecosystem rather than a nuclear accident. I’m just cynical because we keep having more and more babies and turning more and more ecosystems into parking lots).
But anyway, on the good news.
Check out Professor Barry Brook’s new video on nuclear power, only 2.5 minutes.
June 27, 2011 at 1:55 pm
all due respect to Brook, but
hey,
if the current floods set off a nuclear accident at the Nebraska nuclear plants, the entire US breadbasket could be a ‘nature preserve”!
with a nice accident in densely populated Europe, “nature preserves” could be established right in the middle of useless “civilized” areas!
with a proliferation-caused nuclear holocaust, the whole dang planet could be a “nature preserve”.
Oh joys!!!
June 27, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Professor Brook is the head of the climate department at Adelaide University. Other than being a slick Youtuber, who the heck are you?
I take your point about current reactors having risks that today’s AP1000 Passive Safety nukes just don’t have, but we have discussed the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear bombs and the above sentence is just not warranted.
So if you are going to pay Professor Brook his ‘due credit’, can you please calm down a little and THINK about the relationship between nuclear power and bombs?
From my perspective — having explained the power V bomb relationship to you before — it feels *exactly* like explaining the “Temperature precedes carbon change” crock to a Denialist, only to have them turn around and recite another mantra for a few days, and THEN going back and repeating this one!
So let’s try that again shall we? Can you disprove any of the following points?
* What about nuclear bombs?
* I hate the prospect of nuclear warfare, as the mid 1980′s standoff between the USSR and America added much to my teenage angst.
* However, IFR’s don’t produce the right material for bombs. The plutonium bred from IFR’s is mixed in with too much other junk, and requires a lot of processing. Basically, there are easier more direct routes to make a bomb if you really wanted to!
* If a country gets significantly advanced in their nuclear processing they could divert some material into making bombs, but the kind of reprocessing is so particular it stands out to the authorities.
* The countries that produce the most Co2 and therefore most urgently need clean nuclear power are conveniently also the countries that already have nuclear bombs!
* In other words, 93% of the world’s Co2 could be prevented if we ‘limited’ an expansion of nuclear power to those countries that already have the bomb. The nuclear-bomb genie is already out of the bottle. There is no use protesting against nuclear power on the basis of nuclear bombs.
* All you would be doing is protesting against the intensity of nuclear power spreading in those countries that already have bombs, and are already the biggest Co2 polluters.
* So by all means campaign against nuclear bombs, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
* Bombs have to be dealt with politically, where nuclear power can be dealt with both politically AND technically. (By only allowing reactors that can’t produce bomb material).
* Megatons to Megawatts (from Scientific American)
Nuclear energy, far from undermining anti-proliferation efforts, can supplement them. Shortly after the cold war ended, the U.S. started buying warheads from Russia and converting the weapons-grade uranium into fuel suitable for commercial reactors. This so-called Megatons to Megawatts Program has eliminated 15,000 Russian warheads in the past 18 years. Ten percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. in the past decade stems from Russian warheads. The program will soon start consuming Russian plutonium as well as uranium. “It’s an amazing example of beating swords into plowshares,” Adams said.
The spread of nuclear power need not lead to nuclear weapons proliferation. Many countries that have nuclear power plants do not possess weapons. And almost every country that has nuclear weapons today acquired them before acquiring nuclear reactors. (Some commenters on Adams’s blog have pointed out that India is an exception to this rule.) More importantly, nuclear power can promote peace by making nations less reliant on outside sources for energy. “You can write the history of world conflicts over the past 100 years as a battle over resources,” Adams said.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=maybe-nuclear-power-isnt-so-bad-aft-2010-05-11&sc=CAT_ENGYSUS_20100513
Also, Scientific American explains that Generation 3 metal cooled fast reactors don’t involve a plutonium cycle (for bombs), are much safer than water cooled reactors, and turn existing nuclear waste into fuel that we can ‘burn’ again. Eventually, when all the useful energy is extracted, the final waste is down to about 10% of the mass and is so ‘hot’ it burns itself back to safe levels of radioactivity in about 300 years!
June 27, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Check this out Greenman! For your future video on coal…
http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
Then add exponential growth where 1% growth over a lifetime of 70 years = doubled consumption,
2% growth = 4 times the consumption,
3% growth = 8 times,
4% growth = 16 times the consumption of a resource!
However,
Underground coal gasification allow access to more coal resources than economically recoverable by traditional technologies. By some estimates it will increase economically recoverable reserves by 600 billion tonnes.[8] The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory estimates that using UCG could increase recoverable coal reserves in the USA by 300%. According to Linc Energy, the capital and operating costs of the underground coal gasification are lower than in traditional mining.[4].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_coal_gasification
Or as British environmentalist George Monbiot writes:
While I’m prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the UK’s land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies will turn to if the price is right.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/may/10/deepwater-horizon-greens-collapse-civilisation
YUK!
June 29, 2011 at 12:21 am
A while ago, I had a few characters argue about the amount of coal available (and thus the needlessness to worry about peaking oil), yet as far as I’m concerned burning coal for fuel is stupid and short sighted. Vaclav Smil provides one of the most valuable arguments why;
“a complete replacement of 520 million tonnes of coke [based on 2008 requirements for steel production] (setting aside those nontrivial matters of differences in compressive strength and furnace size) would require nearly 2.1 billion tonnes of wood. Even if that wood were to come from such high-yielding species as tropical eucalypts, producing about 10 tonnes per hectare/year, today’s iron smelting would require harvesting annually an area of 210 million hectares of well-managed tropical wood plantations –- or an area equivalent to half of Brazil’s Amazon tropical rain forest.”
Read article here; http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-20090917-iron-age.pdf
What on Earth would we do to produce steel if it was not for coal supplies? Such people are fooling themselves if they think we can produce masses of steel without coal or that we don’t need to produce masses of steel in the first place.
It’s the same type of argument I’ve found from the mob most prolific on Barry’s site (and the reason I don’t really pay as close attention nowadays to BNC). Their attitude, as far as I’ve seen, is little more than business-as-usual run on nukes. And like the coal argument; there’s so much fuel available we needn’t worry.
Well that just doesn’t cut it.
Indeed there is a lot of both fuel supplies. I bet at the dawn of the internal combustion engine prospectors were sure there were many centuries of oil about. The problem is that our current economic models require accelerating growth. The problem is also that developed communities are heavily energy dependent. Prof. Bartlett’s presentations are again kicking up some interest, but if you don’t know of him, look him up; it’s clear that peak will be quicker than we anticipate AND that the downward slope will be shaper than the upward slope – leaving us continually in this pattern of ignorant bliss and sudden shock when we need to drastically rethink how we do things.
I wouldn’t have a problem with most power sources, were it not for the greenhouse gas emissions (related to combustion) and toxic waste production (and I’m certain, with further R&D, nuke waste will be less and less of a worry) but more so were it not for this need for continual production acceleration and inefficient / needlessly energy dependent communities.
The reality is, if the accumulation of GDP was again used to improve the standard of living and invested in natural resource development, rather than to feed the “growth economy”, we’d eventually develop societies where such debates are less common, while also probably achieving such that is largely powered by renewable sources. Coal would be around for many many centuries from now for steel production (and emissions would be negligible with so few other sources) and nukes would support us for millennia where renewable sources are less effective.
Personally, I think the argument to maintain what we do, largely how we do it because we have such wealth of coal and nukes, is short-sighted, aimed to satisfy our personal desires over long term prospects.