LFSCOE: The True Cost of Solar and Wind Energy in Texas and Germany in Answer to the Question...

"...if it (solar and wind so called "renewable energy" ) is the cheapest source while not emitting CO2, why are countries still investing heavily in new gas and coal power plants? Is it just because coal generation may employ more people in politically sensitive regions of the country, or are there financial reasons not reflected in the LCOE?"

This interesting question, which should be a pretty obvious question to ask, although apparently it isn't often asked, given that the trillions of dollars squandered on solar and wind energy has no effect whatsoever on slowing the acceleration of the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, nor have they resulted in a suspension of the construction of coal and gas plants anywhere on the planet, is asked in this wonderful paper:

Robert Idel, Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity, Energy, Volume 259, 2022, 124905.

The paper, of which Dr. Idel is the sole author, is an outgrowth of his Ph.D. Thesis written when he was a graduate student at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, 6100 Main Street MS-40, Houston, 77005, TX, United States. Dr. Idel is a native of Germany, a coal dependent antinuclear "heaven" - at least according to the advertising - and as he was studying at Rice, in Texas, it was reasonable for him to focus on these two regions, both of which have heavy penetration of solar and wind junk; both burn large amounts of fossil fuels to generate electricity, dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, where said waste is killing said atmosphere.

Dr. Idel's thesis is here: Efficiency in a New World: Electricity With Renewables and Storage.

Dr. Idel is no longer an academic, by the way. He is now a Director level employee of Trip Advisor where he manages price auctions according to his Linkedin page. He is, however, a man after my own heart, because his hobby noted on Linkedin is connected with his love, understanding the costs of energy, which he does on his own time. Good for him. He gives a shit.

Another example of a person who worked on science in his case, economics in Dr. Idel's case, on his own time is a guy named Albert Einstein, who while working as a Swiss Patent Examiner, wrote 4 papers in 1905 that changed the history of the world, whereupon, Dr. Einstein was ultimately persuaded to give up his Patent job and reenter academia. This is not a claim that Dr. Idel is Dr. Einstein, but rather that some people's passions matter whether professional or not. My opinion is that Dr. Idel's paper matters.

As of now, Dr. Idel's paper has 41 citations according to Google Scholar, most of which are Social Science papers. I'm personally not a tremendous fan of social "science" if truth be told, but economics is generally included in this category and has a stronger mathematical basis than say, sociology or political "science" and the others, and is thus "sciencey" despite not generating strict mathematically based predictive laws for which precision can be measured unambiguously. (The famous mathematician John Nash won his Nobel Prize in Economics.) In some of these citations one can read all about the issue of say, socialism vs. capitalism, which to my mind has very little to do with the realities connected with the carbon intensity of primary energy and the questionable thermodynamically nonsensical habit of declaring energy storage "green."

"LCOE" which stands for "Levelized Cost of Energy" is a widely used metric by the way, very much so by governmental and international agencies, which declare, as do many of the antinukes around here and elsewhere, that solar and wind energy are allegedly "cheap" without wondering - as should be obvious - about Dr. Idel's question. Again: ...if it (solar and wind so called "renewable energy) is the cheapest source while not emitting CO2, why are countries still investing heavily in new gas and coal power plants?"

Why indeed?

As I note, advocates of the solar and wind industry one sees around here couldn't care less about the state of the planetary atmosphere. They are entirely disinterested in attacking fossil fuels except in vague hollow mutterings about papers and commentary about the work of the climate scientist Jim Hansen. Their main interest is in attacking what I contend is the only acceptable form of primary energy, nuclear energy. Their success in so doing has been a disaster for humanity and all living things, but conversely, very successful for the fossil fuel industry, which never stops growing, and won't, until the last molecule of carbon dioxide is dumped into the atmosphere.

From the introduction to the paper:

The italics are mine.

"Dispatchable" energy is defined as energy systems that can facilely follow load, that is ramp up when there is a demand surge, and ramp down when demand falls. Obviously solar energy isn't capable of "ramping up" in a dangerous extreme heating event lasting well into the evening hours. Events such as this are increasingly common because the trillion dollar solar industry has done nothing - absolutely and positively nothing - to arrest the degradation of the planetary atmosphere.

For the record, modern nuclear plants typically run at better than 90% capacity utilization, sometimes 100% capacity utilization - they are the most reliable energy systems on the planet - and thus are not considered "dispatchable." There are technical reasons why a nuclear power plant is slow to start as currently designed. However, using advanced designs, for instance that proposed by Terrapower and others, they can store short term energy in the most thermodynamically efficient way, as heat.

Anyway...

Dr. Idel works from a supposition that it is possible to go to "100% renewable energy" a subject prattled about endlessly year after year decade after decade as the planet burns, the claim that "energy storage" can make the currently non-dispatchable so called "renewable energy" dispatchable with batteries and or (worse) hydrogen. He then evaluates cost.

As an economist he can rely - as all good science ultimately does - on mathematics. The following is posted as a graphics object to avoid the limitations of the DU editor:




...and so on.

The text continues (again as a graphics object) later:



Additional text (as text):



Table 2:



Figure 1:



Nothing in this fine paper will stop antinukes from attacking the only infinitely expandable climate gas free form of energy, nuclear energy, prattling on stupidly about Three Mile Island and other crap in their bizarre little obsessions, while killing people and the planet by ignoring fossil fuels about which they couldn't care less.

And this raises another point, which is that the LFSCOE proposed by Dr. Idel, ignores yet another factor, external costs. These are the costs associated with the health risks of fossil fuels, the land destroyed by mining for so called "renewable energy" as a result of its extremely poor energy to mass ratios, the wilderness trashed to install this junk, and the ultimate cost of hauling all that crap away and disposing of it, on a scale of hundreds of millions of tons, in 20 to 25 years when it all becomes landfills.

Some of these external costs are difficult to quantify as they are aesthetic, the cost of species lost to water poisoned by mine runoff, the cost of ruined landscapes, etc., others, such as health costs, somewhat more amenable to analysis.

It's pretty clear to me, if not people at the level of antinukism however that table 1 and the commentary about it answers the question - which should have been obvious - that Dr. Idel asks. The answer is that solar and wind are not competitive. They are unaffordable, incredibly expensive.

I trust you are having a pleasant afternoon.