THE DISASTROUS ECONOMICS OF TRYING TO POWER AN ELECTRICAL GRID WITH 100% INTERMITTENT RENEWABLES
The effort to increase the percentage of electricity generated by intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar inevitably brings about large increases in the actual price of electricity that must be paid by consumers. The price increases grow and accelerate as the percentage of electricity generated from the intermittent renewables increases toward 100 percent. These statements may seem counterintuitive, given that the cost of fuel for wind and solar generation is zero. However, simple modeling shows the reason for the seemingly counterintuitive outcome: the need for large and increasing amounts of costly backup and storage – things that are not needed at all in conventional fossil-fuel-based systems. And it is not only from modeling that we know that such cost increases would be inevitable. We also have actual and growing experience from those few jurisdictions that have attempted to generate more and more of their electricity from these renewables. This empirical experience proves the truth of the rising consumer price proposition.
In those jurisdictions that have succeeded in getting generation from renewables up to as high as about 30% of their total electricity supply, the result has been an approximate tripling in the price of electricity for their consumers. The few (basically experimental) jurisdictions that have gotten generation from renewables even higher than that have had even greater cost increases, for relatively minor increases in generation from renewables. As the percentage of electricity coming from renewables increases, the consumer price increases accelerate.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/the-disastrous-economics-of-trying-to-power
