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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035, Study Says
By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.
The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.
As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.
Hopefully our electrical distribution grid will still work.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hartree on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:11PM (3 children)
Rocky Mountain Institute is the organization headed by Amory Lovins. He has a long track record of making predictions that don't pan out. A few years back he and RMI put out a study earnestly saying that nuclear power plants used more land than wind farms.
Back in the 1970s, he was asked in an interview that was in Mother Earth News magazine what he would think of a truly cheap and clean source of energy. His answer "If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. "
I see little that tells me his views have really changed much. He just phrases is in terms of speculative studies with massive assumptions that seem to always paint limited expensive sources of energy as economically winning over the other choices.
I've been to a talk by him back in the 80s. He has a line that is very well received by his fans, but IMHO not very convincing when put to any real analysis.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 11 2019, @09:50PM (2 children)
There's a certain perspective where this actually makes sense. When you run a nuclear power plant, there's generally a large exclusion zone around the plant which is not used for anything productive - it's just buffer space. The cooling canals outside Turkey Point are an extreme example, but the model is consistent around most of the world - people just don't put their homes, factories, or farms right next to a nuke plant.
On the other hand, giant wind turbines can, and in many cases do, share the land with row crops in a rather efficient manner. Their footprint on the land can be as small as the tower base, so, even though it takes a lot of turbines to output the equivalent power of a nuke plant, and they have to be spread over a much larger area, the land they actually remove from productive use can be smaller.
Unless you are a migrating bird, and, frankly, life sucks for migrating birds all over... most of them will probably evolve to become wind turbine aware in a couple dozen generations, and the ones that don't will follow the dodo into extinction.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 12 2019, @10:33AM (1 child)
Wind farms have this buffer space too though one can use it for something productive as you noted. As to the nuclear plant buffer space, one could use it for something productive as well. That they don't is a failure of that particular regulatory system.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:06AM
Our regulatory system is a political manifestation of the general public's fears - not just the exclusion zones, nor the 10 mile radius evacuation warning klaxons, but also the red tape surrounding construction, and especially the shutdowns recently planned in Germany.
Funny that those fears don't manifest as funding for overkill inspections, demands for real transparency in operations, or system upgrades - cynics might think that the fears are being stoked and exploited by interests which benefit from the competition to nuclear power, such as fossil fuels... Significantly, coal mining operations in Germany continue to obliterate small towns in their path, while the stability of German and French geology and the precision of their operation has resulted in zero events of a Three Mile Island level of concern.
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