money that is now burned in gas heaters.

I’m also quite skeptical nat gas can stay so cheap for so long.

On the horizon for solar PV are more efficient cells. 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Efficiency_chart_rev_05-2012.png  Which will lower the cost of solar. 

For wind there are larger windmills and ocean based both of which will reduce the cost per kwh further. 

10-12 years in the future we have nanotechnology. At which time the cost of solar will fall rapidly and so will the cost of energy storage. 

By 2030 the entire fossil fuel industry will be on its death bed as new technologies make the old way of generating energy obsolete. 

However, since NOAA seems to be branching out of their core competency, perhaps they can give us some stock market tips while they’re at it.

NOAA has an excellent record and the report cited is a tremendous service to a field slightly beyond its normal jurisdiction.

If you produce 25% of your electricity from Wind at 4ct per kWh and buy 75% of your electricity from the grid for 9ct per kWh, your electricity costs are 7,75 ct per kWh.

If you took part in building that wind turbine, you basicly pay yourself for getting 25% of your electricity.

You can also combine a windturbine with a local biomass plant… from argricultural waste or waste wood. As a combined heat & power station, that plant would also generate heat (a big chunk of our modern energy consumption).

ADDITION:
The powergrid has trouble handling wind, because it’s outdated and designed for an aging fleet of conventional & centralized power plants.

The energy industry used to say that the grid would collapse if 3 GW of solar were installed in Germany… now we got more than 25GW and everything works superbly… because when it’s produced close to consumers, most of the electricity is being used locally before it enters the transmission grid. Addapting & expanding the local grid to share more of the locally generated electricity is possible and cheaper than huge transmission grid expansions.

Dispatchable generation, storage, and dispatchable load are the ways we integrate renewables into the grid.

ERCOT is doing quite well incorporating wind into their grid. And all that great Texas wind is bringing down the cost of electricity.

Question:

Where does your electricity come from when the wind is not blowing?

Answer:

From a base power source (coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydro).

Wind isn’t cheaper if you have to build base power stations as “backup” when the wind isn’t blowing. The alternative is blackouts / brownouts.

The sporatic nature of wind power also plays havoc with forecasting needs on the grid. Here in Texas, the nation’s leading wind producer, ERCOT has a constant struggle keeping the grid in balance as wind power expands.

I didn’t say that not all communities of the US were connected to the grid. But I said that not all communtities (actually I would assume the majority) have their own gas-field in their area.

The wonderful thing about decentralized renewables is, that they can operate everywhere… without having to drill, paying grid service charges and fuel costs.

Traditionally energy costs are a drain on regional economies… that means that a certain percentage of the local producivity (3-10%) leaves the community in order to fund essential energy needs.

With renewables a community is able to keep that money in the local econonmy. Harvest wind, produce heat, fuel & power from biomass and use small hydro / solar.

Buy energy from your neighbour and he will have a job and be able to buy stuff in your store & pay taxes for schools, roads and other public infrastructure. => Prosperity by local value creation.

Buy energy from a distant supplier and your local economy has no benefits at all. You might get the energy a few % cheaper…. but everyone in your region has to offset the capital outflow somehow in order to increase the prosperity of the region.

Thank you.

Regards,
Raphael

You’re practicing the “I’ve got my fingers in my ears, I can’t hear the facts, la-la-la” denier form of skepticism.

Clearly you have no idea as to the quality of work that is done at NOAA.

I’m merely trying to point out that predictions made by a group of people with a spotty forecasting record in their own field should not be taken at face value when they make projections into another unrelated field.

I’m sorry if my skepticism (on of the true traits of a good scientist) offends you.

That said, what does the ability of anyone to predict the weather have to do with the process of collecting and analyzing huge amounts of wind/solar/electricity demand data?

Or are you just trying to muddy the water in the service of the fossil fuel industry?

However, your assessment of wind assumes that is is always blowing. When it is not, you must have a base power source to back up the wind turbine or suffer blackouts / brownouts.

As for your assertion that not all communities have natural gas, please point out a major city in the United States that does not have a gas pipeline running through it. Many homes do not have gas, but almost every community does.

I will take their predictions on our future energy portfolio with a pound of salt, thank you.

The remaining “gap filling” conventional energy mix will cost approximatly 9 ct per kWh.

Production costs of electricity always include a mixture of return on investment, fuel costs & a profit margin.
So the answer to your question is yes, it does include the the installation cost for new gas power stations.

On your second paragraph:
Wind is propably still cheaper as an addition to gas, because the investment costs per MW aren’t worlds appart and it got no fuel costs, where as fuel cost make up a large percentage of the per kWh costs when burning gas.
Solar is heading into unmatchable territory for end customer useage. Also a great addition to gas.

But for a community is might still be more economical to use 100% renewables, since not all communities have gas… For a community it’s more economocial to buy 100% of their energy from within their community, even if it’s abit more expensive… the community / regional economy prospers, which lifts the regional quality of life. (Local Value Creation)

“(Dr. Alexander MacDonald, Director of the Earth System Research Lab at the) U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was in Vancouver on Friday for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual convention and mentioned in a talk there that clean, renewable energy (not even including hydroelectric) could cheaply supply 48 states of the continental U.S. with 70% of its electricity demand by 2030. The other 30% would be half from fossil fuels and half from nuclear and hydro.

“NOAA embarked on the renewables project three years ago, collating 16 billion pieces of weather data derived from satellite observations and airplane observations and weather station reports,” Scott Simpson of the Vancouver Sun writes.

“Then it designed a program to filter the information to remove unlikely venues for wind or solar power arrays – such as national parks and urban areas – and came up with a map showing robust wind resources in the middle of the continent and decent ones in the northeast Atlantic states, as well as strong solar production areas in the desert southwest.”

But here’s where the NOAA researchers stepped beyond the good to the great, research-wise: they balanced potential power production and electricity demand to determine, how, where, when, and to what extent clean energy could produce the electricity we need. The end result — 70% of electricity demand….”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=clean-energy-could-supply-us-with-7-2012-02

16 billion pieces of data. “(H)ow, where, when, and to what extent”.

70% from wind and solar, 15% fossil (natural gas), 7.5% nuclear, 7.5% hydro.

We’ve already got (as of 2009) 23.4% natural gas, 20.3% nuclear, 6.9% hydro. Since 2009 we’ve built more NG and more hydro.

It’s quite possible that we don’t have the right mix on each of the three grids. It’s also obvious that there’s no storage in the mix and we’re starting to install more storage.

It’s kind of obvious we don’t have a need to build a lot of NG generation. Perhaps re-position some or string some wire.