http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo06/special_topics.html
Cost per unit of energy produced was estimated in 2006 to be comparable to the cost of new generating capacity in the US for coal and natural gas: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MW·h, coal at $53.10/MW·h and natural gas at $52.50.[92]
Those were 2006 numbers. The costs should have come down. At the very least it is on parity with coal, and should be cheaper in areas with reliable high wind.
I don’t really dispute anything that’s been said so far; the one point I think is missing is quality of life - the masses will not willingly reduce their quality of life for something so nebulous and future-based as don’t crap up the planet so future humans can still live on it. That has to be factored into all of these discussions.
Your assuming the places they are putting the wind generators RIGHT now are the crappy wind places and they are saving the best for last.
A reasonable person might suspect the best places would be used first.
NIMBYism might get in the way of that.
And thats going to get BETTER near term?
Your last link says wind energy contracts are pricing out at more than 11 cents per kwh.
There’s no reason to believe the cost will come down. Really, the main way in which wind power can be made cheaper is to locate in areas of high, steady wind, or to build gigantic wind turbines, as some of the offshore installations do. The turbines themselves are a relatively mature technology, with no anticipated breakthroughs in cost that I know of. There are some potential efficiency gains in the generator hardware using advanced materials, but nothing I know of that will seriously bend the cost curve.
The main driver of cost in wind installations is the capital investment. The last decade was a ‘golden period’ for capital investment, with artificially low interest rates and a glut of capital searching for investment opportunities. This is no longer the case. Capital isn’t flowing well, and when it does, it will probably bring higher interest rates with it. In fact, the installed cost of wind went UP in 2007 in the UK as compared to 2006.
The other reason costs will probably go up is that right now, the current wind power stations are taking up the low-hanging fruit - the areas of best wind and best locations with respect to consumers of the power. The price of wind power increases steeply as you move into areas with lower average wind speeds or less stable wind speed, or move into more remote areas where transmission line losses are more substantial. Just a couple of mph less in average wind speed can double the cost of wind power, as can increases in wind speed variability.
I agree that the best wind sites can produce supplemental power that’s reasonably competitive with fossil fuels. But if you ever want wind to be more than 2-5% of total power, you will have to start building in sub-optimal locations, and the price of wind power will go up dramatically.
In the end, we’ll see some countries get maybe 10-20% of their power from wind - these would be the smaller countries with access to excellent offshore winds that can drive large turbines, or countries with plenty of natural areas of high constant wind. Denmark is the only country today which is close to 20%, and they’ve been building wind turbines frantically for decades. The world average for wind power will likely never go above 10%.
The real wild card in the bunch is solar. Unlike wind, there is still room for major breakthroughs in solar. With thin-film technology, nanomaterials and other experimental technologies on the horizon, there’s potential for solar power that’s cheap and ubiquitous. Solar shingles could replace regular shingles on homes and feed power to the grid. Nanomaterial films on car bodies could collect solar power by day and provide illumination at night. Theoretically, the windows of our homes could be coated with materials that absorb sunlight by day, and use the energy to become lighting panels at night, storing the power needed inside the window itself using nanotube capacitors. We could even see roadbeds with solar power generating materials embedded in them one day.
But no one knows where or when this will happen, so you can’t plan for it.
Even ignoring China, India, and Russia, eventually Africa and South America are going to have the same energy needs as the US and Europe. The only currently known and practical source of major grid energy that doesn’t cause CO2 release is Nuclear Energy. But if you can develop nuclear power plants, you can essentially develop Nuclear Bombs. So when all of Africa and South America are using just as much energy as us in 50 to 100 years, it’s a pretty good bet that they’ll be burning coal because we’d rather people not have nuclear energy.
Even if the US starts to convert its coal plants to nuclear, that’s a process that will still take 50 years, and none of Russia, China, India, nor Europe is going to be on a particular faster schedule than us to make that transition.
For at least the next 50 to 100 years, the amount of CO2 being released will continue to rise. That’s a decently safe bet. If we truly want to curb the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’d be better to work on massive air scrubbers than in trying to move to alternate energy sources.
Weird…I posted to this thread from my phone earlier and it vanished. Ah well, I think most of what I said has already been covered better by other posters.
It depends…if you mean in the next several billion years, they yeah…it will eventually all get burned up. If you mean in the next few thousand, then no…not a chance. What will happen is that eventually oil will be scarce enough that it will price itself out of the market as a general all purpose energy source, and we’ll move on to something else. At that point, there will still be plenty of oil left, but it won’t really be worth the cost to exploit it anymore, and so it will just sit there, untapped.
So, I guess the answer (assuming you aren’t talking about when the sun starts to expand after all the hydrogen is used up) is, yeah…I doubt every drop will be burned up.
Well…that’s a totally different question. I’d have to say the answer is probably ‘no’, since I seriously doubt we’ll be able to significantly stop using coal (I realize your OP was about oil, but coal is the real CO2 producer, IMHO, and will be with us much longer than oil IMHO) in any kind of near term time frame…especially since nuclear is pretty much off the table in the near term in the US, and China (the current leader in CO2 production as of, IIRC, 2007) is building coal plants like mad (so is India for that matter). Wind? Solar? They aren’t happening in the short or medium term (maybe not ever anything but bit players)…if the technology was ready for prime time then China and India who are ramping up their energy infrastructure right now would be building those instead of cheap coal plants…and Europe would be moving to a large percentage of their current energy mix to wind/solar (instead of a few percentage points).
-XT
Nope, mi a pretty cool guy, I drill holes in the ground and doesn’t afraid of anything!
In 50 to 100 years “we” will have little to say about it because there will be third or fourth-generation nuclear powers willing to sell nuclear technology to anyone who isn’t their direct enemy and can pay for it. So for example the Congo will get the technical assistance to build nuclear plants from Vietnam, which will have gotten it from Bangladesh, which will have gotten it from Syria… you get the idea.
Yep, that is what I was getting at. I think people should put windmills where there is no wind. Why don’t you tell me what else a reasonable person might suspect.
If the late Ted Kennedy were still around, he could have used that line in a debate and maybe even pulled it off. He hated the idea of windmills off the coast of Cape Cod because it would spoil the view.
Possible. But the question is whether you really want to bank on that compared to solving the problem directly. And if you create scrubbers that can deal with the excess, that gives us some amount of control over the weather. Take for example that even if we deal with CO2 we discover that the amount of heat produced by humanity is raising the Earth’s temperature as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to lower the CO2 to below where it was? Or say that we want to cool Africa so that it’s not as arid, then we could put all our scrubbers on the African continent, figuring that it will create a localized pocket of cooler air. I’d put that down as a handy thing to be able to do.
You said wind power should get cheaper if they put it in reliable wind areas.
WTF wouldnt they be doing that NOW? Either they are already doing that and its not gonna get much cheaper (at least due to location considerations), or they are saving the better locations for later (which sounds pretty stupid/unlikely to me).
Of course Sam Stone made the same point much better earlier.
There’s plenty of oil out there, just like there is plenty of water out there.
The question becomes at what cost can it be made usable? A lot of oil is locked in shale, sand and coal. It can be extracted but the cost is prohibitive. Likewise, there is a lot of water out there but it is saline and not useful for human consumption and irrigation of crops. Yes, it can be recovered but at what cost? “Water, water everywhere but nary a drop to drink.”
The problem is that we seem to be reaching the point that the “easy oil” has been used at a level that is not sustainable in the long run. The cost of going after the more costly oil will have serious economic effects. As with water, if you use up all of your easy, apparent resources then you have to find a source that is much more expensive. Do we want to get to the point that our food supply is being grown from desalinated water from the Pacific Ocean instead of clean water from the Colorado River? Consider the cost.
It’s not conceivable that the last drop of oil will be extracted. There are trillions of barrels in the Rockies shale. There is probably more in the Alberta oil sands. However, based on current technology the cost is prohibitive. Right now it is more efficient to bore deep into the ocean with highly sophisticated and very expensive rigs than to extract from the shale and the sands. That tell you a lot about the economics.
Those with foresight aren’t predicting the day when oil will be tapped out. They are planning for the day when enough alternative sources have diminished the need for oil that the increased cost of obtaining it will not have a major impact on the economy.
some thoughts before i address the OP:
1)there is a huge difference between coal and oil. coal reserves mean about as much as uranium deposits when compared to oil.
2)ditto for wind
3)the energy dilemma is so diverse. are we talking about oil dependency? global warming? ecological preservation? sustainability? there are different answers to each individual problem and no panacea that will address all issues.
4)Europe and China are actually pretty good about implementing new-gen nuclear technology. They’ve actually got pebble bed test reactors up and running whereas the US hasn’t broken ground on a new nuclear site since TMI, though licenses are being passed recently.
ok.
we drill for oil because it’s there. until it runs out, we’re going to keep on drilling. as the supply dwindles, prices will go up. when that cost outweighs having an electric car, people will stop using oil unless absolutely necessary. most likely oil plants would be the first to go. cars would be phased out. plastics after that. however there ARE/WILL BE ALTERNATIVES for all things oil-based. they will be integrated. it’s not like we’ll be drilling and simultaneously and suddenly all the oil reserves dry up. there will be signs, and there will be adjustments. don’t worry yourself over the pending oil-pocolypse. the invisible hand will take care of it all.
Those numbers take into account current federal subsidies for power generation, which is a bit unfair since the subsidies aren’t the same for each form of power generation.
This table shows the cost as calculated by Australian government, independent of subsidies.
The upshot is that conventional coal fired stations cost $(AU)28-38 per megawatt-hour; gasified coal costs $53-98; carbon sequestered production costs $64-106.
Wind costs $75.
Bear in mind that Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal (and fifth-largest producer overall) so coal prices are significantly lower there.