Have all the costs been taken into account?

“As wind development has surged faster than expected in the Northwest over the last five years, the BPA has struggled to integrate the variable resource. They faced mandatory curtailment last spring when high winds coincided with high springtime river flows.”

Please tell me why my first comment on this thread has not been posted – by email if you wish.

wind has hit grid parity and is the cheapest new electricity supply option in many places.

sorry to burst your bubble, but we’re already there.

Sure, it would be wonderful if current utility wind LCOE was truly market competitive with gas or coal. While someday it will likely be so, presently it is not. Competitive power rates are an important factor in keeping any country’s economy healthy. Creating artificially high power rates thru regulation and subsidies is counterproductive in the end. It’s just a cold, hard fact of economics that countries benefit from low cost power, whatever the source.

Getting wind energy LCOE competitive with coal or gas can be done, but it won’t happen overnight. It will take lots of hard work, and continuous, small, incremental improvements to existing technology over many years. It won’t be the result of some whiz-bang, futuristic development like superconducting generators or carbon fiber kites flying in the stratosphere. Instead, the wind turbines of tomorrow will be larger, more reliable, more cost effective versions of current on-shore designs. The future of wind energy won’t be sexy, but that’s the way things work in the real world. Evolution rather than revolution.

The good news is that while coal and gas prices are increasing at a very slow rate, wind power costs are decreasing at a very fast rate. So the long term future for wind is bright.