As we all know by now, wind is the cheapest form of electricity. There are many proofs of this – as an example, three years ago, the Good News Network was telling us how wind farms were soon even going to be paying negative subsidies.

“Offshore wind power will soon be so cheap to produce that it will undercut fossil-fuelled power stations and may be the cheapest form of energy for the UK,” said lead researcher Dr. Malte Jansen, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial. “Energy subsidies used to push up energy bills, but within a few years cheap renewable energy will see them brought down for the first time. This is an astonishing development.”

Good News Network

Astonishing.

Last year wind power became so cheap it was nine times cheaper than gas, as Carbon Brief pointed out (eventually; when they started talking, wind was four times cheaper than gas, but by the time they had finished their sentence, they had to revise the stat upwards to nine times cheaper).

In January, it was announced that the penetration of wind was now over 25% in the UK, and had tipped over 80% at some point:

The UK hit a major energy milestone in 2022 as windfarms produced a record amount of the country’s electricity, according to National Grid. Wind-powered electricity made up 26.8 percent of electricity generation in 2022, up from 21.9 percent the year before, figures from National Grid ESO indicate. And earlier this week, National Grid announced the smashing of another record after the percentage of zero carbon electricity generated onto the grid hit a stunning new record of 87.6 percent.

Express

You see? We can do it, guys. Deniers go to hell, this is no pipe dream. The plummeting cost of wind and our aggressive deployment of it explains why the UK now has the cheapest electricity among developed nations. Manufacturers are flocking to us to build their factories here, so that they can take advantage of cheap energy and the best-trained and most motivated workforce in the G20.

That’s why Labour’s plan to quintuple – er, quadruple – er, water down the quadrupling of offshore wind makes perfect sense. It’s not really even borrowing money because the loan pays for itself in next to no time. The Green Industrial Revolution will definitely work.*

THE SOUND OF A NEEDLE BEING SCRATCHED ACROSS A RECORD

Actually, of course, the notion that wind power brings cheap electricity is delusional. It is a “cheap way to produce expensive electricity” – a phrase I think I heard at the “Decouple” podcast and deployed on my green councillor when he knocked at the door for a chat. How so? Well, as has been pointed out in various fora over the years, wind brings with it a lot of baggage that is “off book.” A recent article by Willis outlines some of the issues that are conveniently forgotten by the likes of Carbon Brief. The parasitic role of wind on a previously stable grid comes about by its inherent instability. Plus, wind farms have to be established in far flung places, necessitating long cables to reach the “core” grid where people live. Means have to be employed to stabilise its frequency; supply backup power for lulls; pay for grid extensions; and for flipping between DC and AC or stabilising the AC [I’m not sure about this last, since the wind farm developer might be responsible some for that]. Then we have the old favourite, which is that – in the UK at least – the “astonishing” rock-bottom prices that wind farm developers promise to sell their power at in some far-off day turn out to be illusions, one-sided bets to get in the game, a ploy beloved of public contractors world-wide, e.g. aircraft carrier manufacturers, or railway line builders, but particularly destructive in this case.

But we don’t just have to rely on argumentation to settle this “argument,” do we? When Rossi produced his E-cat and promised room temperature fusion, it was very easy to use straightforward measurements to establish his veracity. Or it would have been, if the test conditions had been appropriate. But I digress. I decided to find out what effect wind power has on the cost of electricity directly, by collecting two sets of data for a range of countries: 1) the cost of electricity and 2) the penetration of wind. See how easy it is? I decided to avoid cherry-picking a list of countries by taking the top 20 countries by PPP GDP, a list in which the UK now ranks 10th. This list came from Mr. Wiki. Next I got wind penetration stats from Our World in Data. Household electricity prices for September 2022 came from GlobalPetrolPrices.com. Then all I had to do is plot one against t’other, and prove, once and for all, just how stupid we deniers are.

Now before we go any further, we should note a few caveats. These are that some countries might subsidise their electricity. Others might tax it. Some countries might not even have universal connection yet, and that might artificially reduce the cost of electricity in those places. There might be corruption, incompetence, who knows what. And while I am implying – rather strongly implying, I admit – a causal link, correlation is not causation and both variables here might be strongly correlated with a third, some measure of societal decadence perhaps. Some countries might be connected to other countries with other grid characteristics. But with all that being said, what happens when you add wind power to your grid? Does your electricity get cheaper, or more expensive?

Well, there’s your answer. The more of your electricity you obtain by harvesting wind, the more expensive it gets. I have resisted putting a line through the graph, but I will tell you that if I did, it would have a positive slope.

Wind power is still popular – I think it might be the most popular electricity generator according to vox populi, although it is more popular in the abstract than the particular. I suppose this has something to do with an endless stream of stupid people crawling out of their burrows, each eager to make yet another asinine announcement about how cheap wind power is.

And don’t even get me started on the dead birds.

Note & Featured Image

*Don’t let this lead you to think I have any more respect for the other Westminster parties than I do for Labour. They all have a policy of national suicide, which I am against.

The featured image is from Dall.E, with a prompt something like “A Matisse paper cut-out of a dystopian wind farm with dead birds.” This is an evolved version, which has become quite abstract; but I rather liked the emotional effect of all those spiky bits.

Update

In response to Mark’s piece on LCoE and Jo Nova’s piece on the same topic, I thought I’d update this post with recent figures (23.v.2024). Almost a year has passed, and another year of data is available on both axes. Does the relationship still hold? After all, 2022 was an unusual year. Here are the results for the same 20 countries, from the same data sources:

Things have changed somewhat. We in the UK can be proud that we have overtaken Germany in the cost of our domestic leccy. I’ll post this graph on Mark’s, since it is currently active.

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24 Comments

  1. Yes Jit – but you seem to have forgotten that wind turbines are so beautiful

    Apologies: I’m having problems with the link. But my point (confirmed by the head of the National Trust) still stands.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. One trick wind proponents like to use is pointing to Iowa or Scotland where they have a real high percentage of wind generation but they don’t mention that they are part of a larger grid that absorbs electricity when it’s windy and supplies it when it’s calm. There’s no hump for wind and solar to get over. There’s just an impenetrable intermittency brick wall for them to run into.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. Two points, one concerning Mr. Wiki:
    “Jimmy Wales is an internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia. He is a non-executive director of Guardian Media Group, owner of the Guardian…”
    https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jimmy-wales

    Second, unintended consequences:
    “Impacts of accelerating deployment of offshore windfarms on near-surface climate”
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22868-9

    “Wind turbine wakes can impact down-wind vegetation greenness”
    https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac8da9

    Liked by 1 person

  5. JIT,

    That’s all admirably clear. Unfortunately the fact deniers who claim that renewables, especially wind power, represent cheap energy, won’t believe you. Even more unfortunately, they seem to be in charge of government policy.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. South Australia has the most expensive power on mainland Oz and highest wind/ solar penetration. Of course, the politicians try to assure everyone they are unrelated.
    They often have so much domestic solar that the windfarms and grid solar get dispatched off but keep GTs dispatched on at very high non-market prices. If the wind is blowing strong at night, they export the power to Victoria, often at very low or negative spot prices. Then at the dawn and dusk peaks, import a lot back in at very high prices. As politicians can read things into numbers that no-one else sees, I suspect the wind power dumping is what the base their price statements on.
    Most days when there isn’t significant wind, they have to fire up not only gas turbines, but diesel engines. Their beloved batteries do next to nothing, being held as fast start reserves. That daily canyon is why their price is so expensive.
    New South Wales aren’t going to let SA take the crash test dummy title without a fight though. They closed Liddell coal fired station after years of running it into the ground, and no new stations built. That means they almost always have to import power and their prices are going up 20% (unrelated to closing coal of course).

    You can see market pricing and supply here.
    https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem

    Liked by 2 people

  7. “Britain’s green energy disaster should be an awful warning to Americans
    Citizens of the USA, give thanks that you hardly have any offshore wind power”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/11/green-energy-disaster-uk-awful-warning-america/

    Last year, the Biden administration set an ambitious new goal for the USA: to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by the year 2030, increasing US offshore capacity more than seven hundred times over. The UK already has 15 GW of offshore wind, more than 300 times as much as the USA: and our experience should be a terrible warning to Americans.

    The UK’s electricity prices are the highest since records began in 1920 and are now amongst the highest in all Europe. One reason for this is obvious: slightly less than half our electricity comes from gas-burning Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGTs) and gas now costs £90 per megawatt-hour (MWh), nearly five times higher than normal. CCGTs are cheap to build (around £650m per GW) and operate. In normal times they would generate electricity at a total cost of £40 per MWh. That’s now risen to nearly £150/MWh, thanks to Vladimir Putin and his impact on the gas market.

    But that’s not the whole story. The other reason why British electricity is so expensive is because we have so much wind power: particularly, so much offshore wind power. Bad though the current situation is, we would be an even worse state if we had built even more offshore wind, as the British government plans to.

    As an example, the offshore wind farms Hornsea Two and Moray East were completed in 2022 with capital costs of £2.77 billionper GW and £2.75bn/GW, more than four times the cost of CCGT capacity. They’re expensive to maintain, which is not surprising since offshore windfarms have all their many generators mounted at the top of 200-metre tall masts far away from land. Estimates of maintenance costs are as high as £200m per GW installed, per annum. The nominal cost of offshore wind generation is £170/MWh – noticeably higher than that for CCGTs, even in these dire times of high gas prices.

    In 2021 the UK annual grid balancing costs reached £4.19 billion, £150 per household. For context, back in 1995 when we didn’t have much wind power the balancing cost for the grid was a mere £250 million per annum. A large, and growing, contribution to these costs is constraint management, as when a wind farm producing electricity which isn’t wanted – perhaps when it is windy in the middle of the night – is paid not to put that electricity into the grid.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. As a really good example of why South Australian electricity are so prices, this has just been issued – it happens very regularly – several times a week.
    “Possible intervention to manage power system security in South Australia (SA) Region
    AEMO ELECTRICITY MARKET NOTICE
    Possible intervention to manage power system security in South Australia (SA) Region
    The synchronous generating units currently expected to be synchronised in SA from 2330 hrs 11/06/2023 will be inadequate to maintain a secure operating state in SA.
    AEMO estimates that, in the absence of sufficient market response by 1400 hrs 11/06/2023 , AEMO may need to intervene by issuing a direction requiring one or more SA synchronous generating unit(s) to operate or remain synchronised to maintain power system security in SA.

    Having to do this is why the “cheap” renewables are so expensive. Costs aren’t assigned to the renewables that caused them. Similar things happen in other grids.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Chris, it would seem that SA has two big problems:

    1. They still have to rely almost 100% on gas generation at times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
    2. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, renewables penetration approaches 100% and minimum demand drops to near zero at midday because so many homes have solar panels fitted, but they STILL have to instruct synchronous generators to operate or continue to operate, which must be incredibly expensive and wasteful.
    3. The long term ‘solution’ to this problem is to build more synchronous condensers, but they still need the generators to supply electricity when renewables aren’t working.

    “High and growing distributed PV penetration is reducing minimum operational demand, with minimum demand already falling below the thresholds for secure operation of a South Australian island. Minimum demand continues to occur in the middle of the day, typically at the weekend or on public holidays. A record low operational minimum demand (sent-out) of 290 MW was recorded on Sunday 11 October 2020 at 1:00 pm. Minimum demand is forecast to approach zero by 2023-24 in some scenarios, or earlier if PV penetration continues at a pace faster than that forecast. Minimum demand is extremely sensitive to forecast growth in distributed PV. Evidence of strong sales and installations in 2019 and 2020 have strengthened the confidence that consumers continue to look for energy savings through PV installations, and distributed PV forecasts have been revised upwards accordingly. COVID-19 had been assumed to temper some installation growth, however, as at the end of June 2020, there was limited evidence to confirm any real slowdown of distributed PV installations. Due to the continued strong uptake of distributed PV projected, forecast minimum operational demand is declining rapidly.

    As well as energy resources to meet demand, the power system also needs services to maintain system strength and keep frequency and voltage within required limits. These system security services have traditionally been supplied by synchronous generators, but when this generation is not online – such as at times of low operational demand – alternative options are needed.

    AEMO issued 253 directions in South Australia in 2019-20, directing synchronous generators to maintain the system in a secure operating state, compared to 153 issued in 2018-19. This continued the trend of a substantial increase on previous years. • Synchronous condensers, improved interconnection, and contingency frequency reserves from renewable generation and large-scale battery storage, as well as fast-start and rapid-response technologies, are all being progressed as more sustainable long-term options.

    Despite the relatively strong penetration of renewable energy and battery storages, gas-powered generation (GPG) remains a critical source of firming supply and at times provides almost 100% of the electricity demand in South Australia when renewable generation is not available.”

    chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/planning_and_forecasting/sa_advisory/2020/2020-south-australian-electricity-report.pdf?la=en

    Like

  10. Jaime
    Without trying to get too technical, with the reliance on wind and solar, SA has two issues to deal with. They are lack of inertia and fast reserves. The two are linked.
    The inertia they can get from synchronous condensers. They can be a substitute for GTs though they consume electricity, rather than produce it. The reserves are a harder issue. If the state is importing power. and that or the biggest windfarm or heaviest loaded transmission line trips, then voltages and frequencies drop. The rate of drop is governed by the load loss and the inertia. However, to stabilise the grid, they need reserve generation to pick up the slack or the load shedding relays to protect their section of the grid. If they can’t, then it rapidly turns to blackouts. Syncons can’t help with reserves. The normal rule for reserves is they should be multiple sources (in case one fails) AND they are the size of the biggest unit on, which could be an interconnector. Heywood currently is 360MW so it would be the one that determines the reserves needed right now.
    They can go years without a failure scenario happening or it could occur tomorrow. However, when it does, the coal or GT plant will be blamed by politicians who have been caught out.
    SA has already passed going all wind and solar. The duck curve became a canyon. Some months ago, around noon on a number of days, they were exporting power, negative pricing some windfarms & grid solar dispatched off but they had GTs on minimum load. However, that evening, they were firing up the diesels. It was detailed over at Wattclarity.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. “Ørsted warns about rising costs of UK wind development ”

    https://www.ft.com/content/4621f549-85dc-4731-b3ad-6d76969c31d4

    Danish power group Ørsted is set to press ahead with its major UK offshore wind project despite rising costs, but warned that the British government needs to do more to support the sector…

    Global wind developers are facing major challenges due to rising interest rates and supply chain costs over the past year.

    Sven Utermöhlen, chief executive of RWE’s offshore wind business, told the Global Offshore Wind 2023 conference in London this week that the costs of developing offshore wind have risen 20-40 per cent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He added that he did not expect costs to fall anytime soon.

    Like

  14. ” . . . . . the costs of developing offshore wind have risen 20-40 per cent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    Is this what Starmer means by ‘energy security’? Wasn’t the whole idea of developing ‘home grown’ sustainable energy so that we could protect our energy from global price shocks whilst saving the planet at the same time?

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Mark, Jaime – as Jaime says, something smells wrong with all rises blamed on “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    seems to me some are using this crisis as an excuse to bump up prices/profits.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. Indeed, dfh.
    If you check back, you’ll find that prices started rising a good bit before the Ukraine affair.
    But it’s a damn good excuse!

    Like

  17. “The first great requisite of motive power is, that it shall be wholly at our command, to be exerted when and where and in what degree we desire. The wind, for instance, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear. Before the era of steam-engines; windmills were tried for draining mines; “but though they were powerful machines, they were very irregular, so that in a long tract of calm weather the mines were drowned, and all the workmen thrown idle. From this cause, the contingent expenses of these machines were very great; besides, they were only applicable in open and elevated situations.”

    That’s a quote from William Stanley Jevons in 1865, posted by dennisambler on NALOPKT.

    We’re still learning the lesson, over 150 years later……

    Liked by 2 people

  18. DFH, Cat. Prices may have begun to rise before Russian invasion of Ukraine but I don’t think you can argue that the rises weren’t further impelled upwards by that occurrence, or even that the war was the cause of most of he price rises. For many essential commodities, like grains and potash (for fertiliser) it may have been responsible for world wide shortages and thus price increases.

    Like

  19. Mike, you can read the entirety of The Coal Question at Archive.org. It is full of sensible discussions of principle, even if some of the conclusions and predictions did not hold up completely!

    Like

  20. The ramping up of UK natural gas price is shown in this graph from Trading Economics, which I’ve annotated with the dates of the sharp peaks.

    Trading Economics’ current summary of UK natural gas reads:

    UK natural gas futures surged past 87 pence per therm, the highest in five weeks driven by supply concerns, in line with the European benchmark. Natural gas traders are worried about potential disruptions and closures at gas facilities, despite the fact that fuel reserves in the EU are at their highest level ever for this time of year. On top of that, UK wind power generation remains at low levels, increasing the dependency on natural gas. Also pressuring supply, capacity at Norway’s Vesterled pipeline to Britain was lowered until the half of August, before its eventual shutdown in the end of September.

    Like

  21. Jit,

    I noticed that there was a sudden upwards surge in the price of gas, according to the BBC Market Data page. It’s still only around 1/7 what it was at the peak, but it’s a worrying trend. Nevertheless, it’s still at a level where the claims about renewables being cheaper, never mind massively cheaper, than gas, remain rubbish.

    Like

  23. You beat me to it, Jit!

    As with Net Zero, the UK leads the world in its pursuit of disastrous policy. Meanwhile we trail the field in things that matter like growth, education, health, etc..

    Liked by 1 person

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