It doesn’t take long to recognize the fallacies contained in this nonsensical piece of green cheerleading. Is “levelized” even a word? In any case, this form of measurement is akin to judging length using a rubber band instead of a measuring stick. And who knew that the wind is guaranteed to always pick up after 8 hours?
Using a measurement called “levelized cost of energy,” the report found a new natural gas “peaker” plant, like the one currently proposed for Windsor, can produce a kilowatt hour of electricity for 23 cents. It costs 21 cents per kilowatt hour to generate electricity with a new solar farm coupled with eight hours of battery storage. A new wind farm with eight hours of storage can generate that amount of electricity for 11 cents.
I want to see the numbers that detail the energy cost of building and installing those wind turbines.
You can’t rely on any of the numbers published by big green, none. They simply make them up as they go, they know they do, and they don’t care as the ends justifies the means and none of the MSM will call them on it as they are Sauron’s mouthpiece. After all, if one is saving the planet then even truth must give way to this noble cause.
What’s the cost of running a really long extension cord over to Quebec and plugging it in there?
If you were going to go green intelligently, you’d pick a pilot city, say Edmonton, or San Francisco, and power that city 100% with renewables, all situated locally. I.e. windmills, solar, and sufficient batteries to provide power for one year. The city would be disconnected from the state or provincial grid.
Next you’d provide (and charge everyone) with a small electric vehicle). You’d have to up the number of windmills, batteries, solar panels etc.
No one will do this cause the lessons learned will be the death knell of green energy, as will the riots that occur when the gang green classes can’t heat their houses, or charge their phones due to electricity rationing.
“Clean” energy is 21 cents a kilowatt. Germany is know to be a world leader in clean energy. Check the price as of June, 2022. https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_prices/. So who will be accountable when there price model is totally wrong?
So what do you do when you are on your 8th hour of battery in February and the weather forecast is for sub zero temps, snow and two weeks of cloud cover with no wind. I suspect the “levelized measurement” is a model much like the climate models that have been so accurate (SARC) and doesn’t take the construction and maintenance costs of the green solution into account. If you build your green dream power solution you also have to build a base load gas peaker system to support it – so double the cost. They really need to start teaching logical thinking and finances in high school, even basic math would help.
“… If you build your green dream power solution you also have to build a base load gas peaker system to support it – so double the cost..”
No, you have it all wrong. Wind is free but for some unexplained reason when you build a CCGT you have to build two, so they cost more than wind. Did I mention that wind if free? /s
Exactly.
Here in the Pacific NW wind generation has been nil for the past 5 days. The Bonneville Power Administration (US Dept of Energy) maintains a website that tracks aggregate loads and generation over a 7 day time frame.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
Worse, wind tends to drop off during extreme hot / cold, which is when we need generating resources the most.
The Star article is based entirely on crap from activists.
Let’s look at how Germany is doing. Any reason to think we are smarter?
Yes, Germany is the world leader in “green” energy. And yes, their energy prices are higher than everyone except Denmark. Currently 3.6 times ours for families.
Germany recently announced a 40 billion Euro program over the next four years to speed the transition to renewables. Using the German government’s estimates for emissions cuts and IPCC scientific data, Bjorn Lomborg projects this expenditure will reduce global warming by 0.00018 ⁰C, or one degree per 5,555 years. The cost benefit ratio using today’s technologies is very poor. Using the same methodology, if Ontario’s total energy sector emissions of 3.2 Mega tonnes vanished overnight, the impact on annual global temperature would be 0.0000054 ⁰C or one degree in 184,000 years..
Given this information, would Ontario taxpayers put the money into long term care beds or emissions reduction?
Numbers like 0.0000054 ⁰C or one degree in 184,000 years are only accurate if our emissions actually did cause dangerous global warming, which they don’t.
Dirtman, you are correct in questioning the accuracy of these figures, but CO2 does cause warming, all other things being equal.
The amount of warming caused by a doubling of CO2 (according to the IPCC) is somewhere between 2.5 ⁰C to 4.0 ⁰C. Many sensible scientists claim the figure is lower, but almost all agree that some warming takes place. At current rates, doubling would be in about 175 years. Is this “dangerous” – no.
Satellite measurements of global temperature have been available since 1979. The globe has warmed at 0.16 ⁰C per century since then.
A good source is here:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/
21 or 23 cents per kwh for interim generation. Don’t I pay 8.5 cents retail for 24/7 coal and natural gas power?
The test for these proponents is to make them supply grid power (matching demand with their own resources) on their own and be competitive. They can’t and won’t. Battery storage for 8 hours for a city the size of windsor is impossibly expensive. This article is indeed pom pom waving by the innumerate.
It’s the Toronto Brown Star. What else would one expect from them?
Just when do you plan on charging the magic batteries?.. During the day when businesses and industry need the power or at night when we are at home with our EVs plugged in?..
IMO a gas powered plant is a magic battery that doesn’t need windmills and solar panels :). That’s a huge savings..
Why we are all FORCED to adopt their lifestyle is a question that needs asking..
Ned,
“Combining solar with natgas backup for nights winter and cloudy days is by far the lowest cost form of energy today.”
I’m with you if you actually include the FULL operating and capital cost of the natural gas backup in your calculations. I haven’t seen the math work out.
If it’s such a no brainer, why aren’t jurisdictions flocking to the solution?
Steve Bannon interviews Dave Walsh regarding wind turbines and renewable fiasco. GE and Seimens losing money on wind , big sales in nuclear refurbishment and ,,,GAS TURBINES .. because wind and solar on average only produce at best , on average 9 hours per day and gas turbines are needed as fillin.
https://frankspeech.com/video/warroom-steve-bannon-dave-walsh-energy-consultant-former-president-mitsubishi-power-systems-9
“Clean Energy Canada” is funded by the North Family Foundation, Sitka Foundation, Trottier Foundation, McConnell Foundation, Ivey Foundation, Brigham Foundation, Houssain Foundation, Echo Foundation, Donner Canada Foundation, and the Catherine Donnely Foundation.
Echo Foundation is a private charitable foundation incorporated in 1983, whose head office is in Montreal.
The Houssian Foundation was created by the Houssian family in 2005.
Established in 2003, the Catherine Donnelly Foundation is the human and financial legacy of the Sisters of Service.
The others are presumably equally vague about who funds them and what their real goals are.
Dark money organizations not accountable to anyone who influence public policy with advocacy and what…? This web of interconnected, secretive organizations needs to be investigated for foreign and corporate influence. But of course they never will, because our government is in bed with them.
Lol with nat gas backup. Might as well skip the environmental destruction and stick with the nat gas
Ah, the magic batteries are just a lie. Also, the statement that renewables are becoming cheaper than fossil fuels is also a lie.
We used to pay 5-7 cents per kWh in Alberta when the grid was coal and gas. Now it’s over 10 cents to be mostly gas with some wind/solar. 21-23 cents is EXPENSIVE. And whoever is writing the article doesn’t understand the subject at all. The mix power unit (kW, MW) with energy units (kWh, MWh). Storage must be reported in MWh units – to say you have 2500 MW of storage is MEANINGLESS. Can it actually output 2500 MW? for how long? 1 hour? minutes? Definitely not days.
I priced grid-scale energy storage for Alberta (since all the wind farms output can be determined from a single weather station) and came to $160B for 1 day of backup (if the grid was only renewables and we were becalmed in the winter darkness).
We can’t afford grid scale storage – and NEVER will.
To get to 23 cents per kWh for gas peakers you would need to be including a $170 / tonne carbon tax on the emissions and very high natural gas prices. A peaker power plant can be built for less than $1200 / kW in capital expenditure. Natural gas costs less than 2 cents per kWh. Even at peaker efficiency the operating cost is peanuts (except for the carbon taxes).
Carbon taxes raise the price of energy to the point where renewables look attractive. This is inflationary, BY DESIGN, even if the politicians don’t seem to understand that. The green transition is going to get VERY expensive for everyone, and it is the poor who will suffer the most.
levelized cost of energy.. A thumb on the scale used to be a crime..
Wind and solar are intermittent and punishingly expensive.. Nuclear is a retrofit boondoggle that never gets out of the red.. Think of nuclear as a cold war propaganda relic that never really cut its economic teeth unless your willing to burn money as if it were coal..
They get to write their own check.. This cost is always hidden.. Wind and solar want in on the action..
If you think about it, energy has been political for as long as government has nationalized it.. Therein lies the problem..
Sure, it might, maybe, generate at that cost (everything I have seen says it cannot), but the cost I heard of the batteries says they multiply the cost by thirty. Imagine your power bill multiplied by thirty.
Night is longer than 8 hours.
Saskatchewan was becalmed last week for what? 72 hours? So what possible relevance does 8 hours of battery storage have? Lipstick on a pig.
The usual nonsense and irrelevance from the proponents of the Green New Death.
This was late 2021:
Alberta 16.6¢/kWh
British Columbia 12.6¢/kWh
Manitoba 9.9¢/kWh
New Brunswick 12.7¢/kWh
Newfoundland & Labrador 13.8¢/kWh
Nova Scotia 17.1¢/kWh
Northwest Territories 38.2¢/kWh
Nunavut 37.5¢/kWh
Ontario 13.0¢/kWh
Prince Edward Island 17.4¢/kWh
Quebec 7.3¢/ kWh
Saskatchewan 18.1¢/kWh
Yukon Territory 18.7¢/kWh
Canada Average 17.9¢/kWh
LCOE = BS
The never include transmission from multiple diffuse sources, they never include “stablization” that was never previously needed, they never include the massive complexity of operations , they never include the fact that fossil fueled redundant power must been maintained for system security. Just more wishful magical thinking. So called “renewables” have never been cheaper in any market anywhere.
They keep telling us that wind/solar is so cheap. Yet every jurisdiction that has gone heavily into renewables has seen their cost to consumers double, triple and even quadruple.
Authors of stories like this are living in a fantasy world and ignoring reality. People unfortunate enough to be living in a renewables-supplied real world situation are under no such illusions.
Blowhards use wind energy.
I think I have wasted more than enough time attempting to explain why wind turbines and solar panels are never going to be practical to power a modern society and city.
Re-roofing sellers in WA state are now telling folks. You want a solar powered roof. You can (IF) you have a metal roof. Any other type is a no go. Because guess what. The brackets that hold the panels that screw into your roof well at one point, will leak and the roofing companies will not guarantee the roof.
SO they compared the worst kind of gas plant (a peaker), to the best that solar has to offer, and came up with a story about how it works out to slightly cheaper per kilowatt to use a solar farm with 8 hours of battery storage.
They intend to us 2 gas turbines to produce 100MW, which can easily fit into a 1 acre footprint, version 100MW of nameplate Solar that will take up at least 230 acres, let alone the 8 hours worth of batteries, which isn’t enough time during the winter.
The crime committed by the press and the governments is to express “success” in terms of CO2 reduction. That’s a meaningless metric. What counts is the theoretical impact on global temperature, measured in ⁰C.
The warming caused by a tonne of CO2 emissions is 0.0000000000017 , or one degree per 588,000,000,000 years. That’s accurate to within factor of three, perhaps.
If Canada’s emissions went to zero, annual global temperature increase would drop by 0.0019 ⁰C, or one degree per 840 years.
“We’re all gonna die!”
Fun with figures. I calculated the physical impact of the Federal carbon tax which was supposed to reduce Canadian emissions by 90 Megatonnes. If successful as advertised (a big IF), here’s what we would have noticed by the resultant cooling.
As altitude increases, temperature cools. This ‘adiabatic lapse rate is 1.98 °C/1,000 ft. By 2022 the temperature impact of the federal carbon tax would have ‘felt” the same as an altitude increase of 0.9 inches or 2.3 centimeters. Something like stepping on a thick carpet.
With latitude, average temperature cools by about .6°C / 100 mi. The 0.00015°C projected temperature decrease would be the same as by moving Northward 132 feet, or roughly two suburban building lots.
Sure makes it all seem worthwhile!!! Obviously more important than new hospital beds.
There are no mathematicians in the “Humanities”.
Toronto Star = Shameless whores.. Did you expect the commissars to come clean on your suck assed future?.. That would be a no..