this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Wind and renewables in general already out-compete oil. If you think about a traditional power plant, the costs can be lumped into 4 categories:
Over the life of the plant, fuel has always been the dominant cost. With renewables, there are no fuel costs. Sure, the other costs might be slightly higher (wind farms are in remote areas, you have many small generators as opposed to a few big ones - solar is still dirt cheap though) but the fuel cost being non-existent easily overrides that.
The biggest travesty is that we basically have renewable energy sold at oil prices, creating insane profit margins for renewables.
Also I have no idea what you mean by the IRA and keep wondering what Ireland has to do with all this.
Solar is vastly cheaper -- it costs so little that it becomes hard to model it. Wind works out to ~$32/MWh in the US. Compare that to fossil gas at $5-$30/MWh, depending on the region, and wind is decidedly not out-competing gas. At least not yet. If it continues to get invested in and allowed to deployed, the learning curves on it should be able to bring its price down quite a lot, though.
And yes, those are LCA prices. No one is going to be as simplistic as to just look at one cost center and ignore the other the real costs of energy generation.
Energy is sold at market prices, aside from that which is sold via purchase agreements with utilities that set the prices manually (this happened a lot with coal and ended up being a huge blunder for many utilities who later had to go back and buy out coal plants just to shut them down because they were stupid expensive). Solar being very profitable because fossil energy is pumping up the price is a good thing, not a bad thing -- this creates huge market incentives to scale up solar production, which is exactly what is actually happening all over the country right now. There's no universe in which it is a "travesty" that solar or any renewable has profit potential to deploy right now. We need as much of it deployed as fast as possible. We need it to be profitable enough to get projects off the ground, especially while interest rates are still painfully high and utility interconnection queues are years long and interconnection is often punishingly expensive for no good reason.
This is a discussion about US climate policy. The inflation reduction act is the most important piece of legislation in US history on the subject of climate. Maybe even including the clean air and water acts. I'd encourage you to read up on it.
And I'd encourage you not to use initialisms that are unfamiliar to the vast majority of people on a global forum without explaining them
Americans are the first to complain when it happens the other way around because their worldview is so blinkered!
The IRA is definitely the Irish Republican Army 😂
Being ex British Forces, this always makes me laugh.
I was wondering what it had to do with Individual Retirement Accounts.