You want the math to talk? Talk economies of scale and learning curves. As we ramp up production of renewables, you lower the costs associated with them.

There's a log-log learning curve. Solar PV has been experiencing a learning rate of 18%. In 2004 Solar PV cost between 24-48 cents per kWh. By 2020 its expected to be 10-16 cents per kWh and keep on decreasing. Its expected to decrease to below the cost of wind eventually. Wind is expected to cost 1.5-2.5 pence per kWh by 2020. That's cheaper than any other provider of electricity. It followed a similar log learning curve to solar: with a reduction in costs of 53% from 1990-2004. In 2004 it cost 3-5 cents per kWh. Coal cost between 6.6-21.7 cents per kWh with external environmental and health costs added.

Government subsidies? The feed-in tariff system used for a long time in most of Europe had no government money injected into it. The consumer pays. How much? Customers in Germany have paid ~3% extra on energy bills so far, while over 200,000 jobs created and 20GW of wind expansion and 2GW of solar PV.
What house falling down with withdrawal of government subsidies? There aren't any.


Good job in ignoring all the posts where I pointed out and provided sources that its possible to reliably run a country off a huge percent of renewables even when its sometimes not windy or sunny.

Supplementing?
If your country's military needed more weapons would you supplement them with bows-and-arrows?
Perhaps you would have them supplement their arms with wooden clubs? Yes?
A sane person would supplement with the state-of-the-art technology.

The technology of wind/solar is not there to compete in a free market...
Wind/Solar/Biofuels are energy weaklings that need massive govt subsidies and even then they are a bad deal to use...

As for the math, why don't you support the withdraw of subsidies for wind/solar and we will see whose math is correct...
Without subsidies, your town never would have put up that windmill...

flying banana - depending on what you consider to be the useful life of PV, it's already below 16 cents per kWh.

And Jiggs' last post actually hit the nail on the head. Renewables aren't about replacing fossil fuels (at least the renewables on the market). It's about supplmenting the reliable production during peak consumption times (which, incidently, coincides quite nicely with solar peak production times). This enables us to have to run fewer backup power plants at 10% power (which is extremely inefficient) while they wait for the middle of the day to ramp up and provide the energy to the grid that is needed.

Felix - if you're going to take away renewables subsidies, you need to take away federal subsidies for coal, nuclear, and gas. Of course, then renewables would be competitively priced with the more traditional forms of energy.

Edit: Felix according to your logic, without government subsidies YOUR town would never have put up the power plant that is currently supplying power.

Award for most piss-poor analogy in the history of blogging forums everywhere.

Still you talking. Not math.

No one gets a greater subsidy than the oil industry. Oops.

LOL.

Shill-tacular.

Still waiting for some math to start talking. Meanwhile, banana above crushed your tired talking points a while back, you know, with actual links backing up his assertion. Try reading the thread before bloviating more fossil fuel agenda.

Hey Felix:

Let's remove all subsidies from solar. I can install a plant on a large rooftop (say a large Best Buy or a super walmart), such that the cost per kWh for the first 25 years (including maintenance charges, etc) is less than 14 cents. This is less than the cost of electricity in many places - electricity that is federally subsidized.

And then when you consider the fact that there is plenty of evidence that solar panels will last for 40+ years, the economcis get even better.

Of course then when you add subsidies into the equation, it gets even better.

There are huge RECs with renewables (reneable energy credits). I don't know much about them, but I know there indeed are huge subsidies to make them at least somewhat attractive (which, really, they aren't).

yes, when I said remove ALL subsidies, I was including sRECs. Even though sRECs aren't a federal subsidy but a utility/consumer one.

Actually the obvious solution to all of this is clearly a Dyson Sphere

This sounds fascinating. Can you provide a source?

So what do we do on cloudy days or windless days?
Have the solar/windheads solved the energy storage problems?


I doubt it. If 25% of your power source disappears because of a cloudy day that missing 25% needs to be made up elsewhere...

They will run out in about 100,000 years. Maybe...
Coal-to-gas technology gives consumers an ample supply of energy whether it is gasoline or natural gas or coal in its original form...

SASOL of South Africa has proven it can be done in large quantities...

I read banana's drivel.
I'm surprised you found his braying to be meaningful.
It seems I over-estimate you...by a factor of 10:1.

Banana's argument sounds like a pitch from a snake-oil salesman where wind/solar are so perfect and all the problems have been solved.

The simple truth is cloudy days and windless days make these technologies unsupportable....
And unless you pump massives loads of govt subsidies into these boondoggles, no sane person would invest in them. And an energy storage solution is still not feasible... Wind/solar still need to sit on the bench. They are not good enough...

This is fascinating! You might convert me on this one point.
Do you have a source for this assertion?

I would love to see an apple-to-apple comparson of these subsidies.
You know, like $/Mega-Joule type comparson or something similar....
Please get this source soon. It could mean the difference in me converting to a windhead/sunhead tonight...

Maybe someone else can confirm this, but I am 99% sure peak power use, during summer namely, is right about 5pm to 7pm as people get home and just AFTER sunset (and obviously just before sunset, but either way, nowhere near when solar power is peaking.)

It's been a few years since I read up on the stuff but I looked into a lot of "green" energy companies just before and after Obama was elected for the purposes of possibly investing in some.

I remember thinking "this **** is not going to be viable anytime soon."

The most promising (and it's pretty far away) is spray-on paint application of solar panels that can be, well, essentially painted onto existing buildings to essentially turn skyscrapers into giant solar batteries.

That tech is still in the venture fund and development stages. If I had more money and wanted to bet on green energy, that's where I'd stick my money.

As been mentioned repeatedly. Wind and solar (and most other renewable sources) fluctuate day to day. Even that European mega-grid, as described is highly suspect because, well, weather for very large areas tend to be highly correlated. To get away from being affected by the same weather systems we need to start talking about super-duper transcontinental power transmission. At that point we're talking about pumping enough power on those lines to launch Enterprise (Star Trek) into space and probably power its sublight engines, at least for a while.

Never mind the cost of construction of such a network. Even 0.0001% failure rate per day of such a network can effectively cost (tens of) billions of dollars per year on average. (in case you're wondering that comes out to about 1 failure every 9 years). Please don't just say redundancy. For a network of this scale, we're talking about triple, quadruple and possibly more layers of redundancy to get failure rates into anywhere near acceptable ranges.

It's simply much more cost effective to build nuclear/hydro power/geothermal (when technology matures) to supply "baseline" power on a consistent and more localized bases. The calculations, as they stand now, are not close.

See weather.com for US
http://image.weather.com/images/maps...wx_600x405.jpg

And indeed Europe seems half covered in the same weather system
http://image.weather.com/images/sat/...at_600x405.jpg

Gosh!!!! ... Ermmmmm... how about the IEA, mmm-kay?

But, I'm sure you'll spin this ratio into something wildly irrelevant. My statement was merely that no source gets more subsidies than your fossil fuel heroes. Don't move goalposts. Just deal with it.


More Than $5 Fossil Fuel Subsidies for Every $1 of Support for Renewables

The International Energy Agency’s 2010 World Energy Outlook, released today, should finally stamp out the myth that renewable energies are dependent on subsidies.

“Fossil-fuel consumption subsidies amounted to $312 billion in 2009”, says the IEA, while renewable energies in the same year received just $57 billion of “government support” according to the IEA. In other words, renewables got just $1 for every $5-6 given to fossil fuels last year.

The IEA goes on to forecast that government support for renewables will go up to $205 billion in 2035. That is still – a quarter of a century in the future – less than two-thirds of the sum being doled out to fossil fuels today.

In this time of budgetary constraints, governments would be wise to remove the billions of dollars spent in subsidising fossil fuels as well as nuclear. That in turn would mean less subsidies would be needed to bring in new, smarter and cleaner energy technologies such as wind power.

"Stop talking for a little while. ... Maybe sit the next couple of plays out"

You're being a hypocrite, and the fact remains that taking away energy subsidies would doom ANY energy industry, not just renewables. But you just make sure to huff and puff your RW, burn-everything agenda.

I learned long ago that any time you meet someone stridently against even minimal renewable energy investment, immediately do not trust them.

That analysis is asasine for a number of reasons.

Not the least of which is fossile fuels provide more than than 10~20x the power as "green" sources right now, depending on how you want to define the specific categories.

So yes, green energy is significantly more reliant on subsidies than fossil fuels in terms of energy generated per $ of subsidies.

Never mind the US (not even counting states yet) alone collects hundreds of billions from fossile fuels on various points of the supply chain.

And no, and unequivocally no, taking 325 billion dollars away from the fossil fuel industries will not doom it. The world consumes over 30,000,000,000 (it's more like 31 billion I think) barrels of oil per year. That's 3 trillion dollars worth of oil consumed per year at current prices. 325 billion dollars won't make a dent on a world wide scale. The oil companies will bitch, cry and whine, but they'll live. I am not even talking about coal and natural gas yet.

I actually do believe green energy research is underfunded but your argument is a very intellectually dishonest one.

Renewable energy thus got a much higher per kWh subsidy than fossil fuels since the fossil fuel sector is far more than 5 times larger than the renewable sector.

On a per BTU basis, renewables are still subsidized more. I suspect many ITT are aware of that and its pretty disingenuous not to mention it.

Ending subsidies for all forms of energy would not make renewables price competitive.

See here for both of my statements:

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2010...l_subsid.shtml

A price on carbon would make wind/solar more competitive (I believe there are a few parts of the U.S. where wind might be very close to competitive already), but depending on the price it might just shift more power production to natural gas/nuclear.

As long as its an apples-to-apples comparison, then I'll let the math do the talking.
That is the only honest way to compare. And let the facts fall where they may...
And you value honest comparisons. Yes?

So you do NOT have an apples to apples comparison?...
Why am I not suprised.
And why are the dull-witted so easily fooled by apple-to-orange comparisons?
Subsidy-Dollars/Unit-of-Energy is the only honest way to compare.
But is honesty what you are looking for?
Or are you looking for misleading facts to make you case and the truth be damned?

Well in the USA, the claim is 11.2% of US electricity is produced by renewable energies (and I think this figure is suspect). If we throw gasoline in the mix (afterall wind/solar can't power a car), I would be suprised in wind/solar accounts for even 2% of this nations gross power needs.
So for both energy sources to be equals in the eyes of the govt, oil should be receiving $100 in subsidies per $2 in wind/solar subsidies. But wind/solar subsidies account for about 17% of the subsidies though only providing 1-2% of out nations energy gross needs???!!!
That paints a poor picture of wind/solar.
Or should I say an accurate picture of wind/solar.
I said wind/solar are the 90 lb weaklings of the energy sector and you have made my point quite nicely...
Thank you...

Really!!! <whistles>
You are finanally going to give us an apples-to apples comparsion?

Just as I thought.
You won't give a $/unit-of-energy figure because that would sink your whole case.

I say end all energy subsidies.

Why should I do that when your arguments are so bad that they are entertaining.
Sorry but you half-assed thinking on renewable energy is VERY entertaining.

I don't recall ever advocating energy subsidies for oil.
Kindly point out where I have done so or be a man and apologize...

And please don't use words you don't understand.
It makes you sound less intelligent.
To be a hypocrite there are a few requirments.
Please consult your closest dictionary and educate yourself...

How convenient! That way you never have to examine your own thinking.

Shhhhhhhhh!!!
Don't spoil Jigg's utopian dream.
Jigg's is so cute when he spouts off about his imaginary dream-land.

An apples-to-apples comparison ($/unit-of-energy) would ruin his fantasies of Bambi playing with butterflies under a giant GE windmill.
While the GE windmill chops up birds/bats that are unfortunate enough to fly into their moving blades.
This assumes of course that the wind is blowing and thus avoiding mass blackouts accross the country...

And think of winter time where sometimes the entire continents are covered in clouds.
What will the solarheads do then?

Let Jigg's have his dreams.
When he turns 18 then you can educate him about the real world...

This is pretty lol given the externalities associated with coal, nuclear.

Also, to their credit, fossil fuels have been subsidized for quite a long time.

I don't understand your post.
Previous posts have established that energy subsidies are given.
So why state what has already been established?

Fossil fuels will survive with or without govt subsidies.
American oil subsidies are about making the RELATIVELY tiny American oil companies compete against the worlds giant oil cartels... I personally think American oil companies can compete without subsidies but most American pols want the subsidies to stay in place...

The simple truth is:
Oil is the current state-of-the-art energy source and barring a major tech breakthrough, no other energy source can compete with it.

Oil can survive with or without subsidies.
Perhaps American oil companies would go out-of-business without subsidies (which I strongly doubt), but all this would mean is the world's giant state run oil companies would quickly fill Exxon's RELATIVELY tiny market share.
Wind/solar/biofuels can not say the same thing...
Without subsidies no one would build a windmill outside a research center...

As for solar it has its selective uses.
If I want to power a single traffic light in a remote area then solar is great because running power lines would be cost prohibitive in that scenario.
This does not mean that some future Leonardi da Vinchi might invent a viable solar power source but it does mean that solar is CURRENTLY a lousy energy source...

And wind is not a reliable power source either...

I agree that fossil fuels could survive without subsidies, while most renewables couldn't. It's obvious.

My point was, having been previously subsidized for a long time, while (significant) renewable subsidies are relatively new. I'm pretty confident that this has allowed them (not oil, but coal) to invest more in the industry over the past 30+ years and as a result offer lower present rates.

Your point is well taken...
The govt oil subsidies is more of a national security issue.
If Exxon et al... ever go out-of-business, then relying on hostile Middle-East for oil puts the USA in a very bad position.

You can see what would happen by looking at Com-China using its vast Rare Earth Metal resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element

Rare earth metals are not rare but they are highly concentrated in Com-China.
China recently bullied both the USA/Japan by cutting off their rare earth metal exports to these countries.
As a result, the USA is reopening up a rare earth metal mine in California.
And I would argue it would be VERY PROPER to subsidize this mine in case Com-China tries to hold us hostage in the future...

As for US oil subsidies, I think the US oil companies can survive on their own as long as the US govt does not inact more anti-oil legislation...

But my point remains the same:
*Wind power is not feasible because of windless days and barring a breakthrough in energy storage technology, wind will never be viable.
*Solar power is not feasible (outside remote areas where laying power lines would be cost prohibitive).
We have all seen the weather radar during winters where the entire USA is covered by clouds days at a time. Where will we get the power in these scenarios? From sunny Mexico? No that wouldn't be feasible either...

The best game in town is still oil, hydro (for those few areas with proper geography), coal, and nuclear...

I just don't think you can argue green energy is ready for prime time to replace currently dominant technologies.

If you gonna support it, I think you need to argue the long term necessity of developing the technology to eventually replace fossil and possibly nuclear power generation.

Essentially, I think of the higher costs of renewable energy as long term R&D.

The state that produces and uses the most wind energy by far is that left wing bastion, Texas.

I don't understand what everyone is concerned about. We'll have Mr. Fusion in 4 years.