2025_08_28
The price of energy and the system costs of renewables
This is an excellent article by Prof. Dieter Helm, explaining why the electricity prices are so high, and why the real costs of the intermittent solar and wind should be considered as system costs.
The paper analysis the situation in the UK, but most comments apply also to other countries, where the governements promise cheaper electricity prices, that never show up
Here a short extract:
"Solar and wind are intermittent, low-density, geographically distributed generating technologies. No modern economy could rely solely upon them. There has to be back-up. This back-up is an additional cost of renewables, and it would be reflected in the discounted EFP prices that renewables would achieve. No wonder the lobbyists for renewables hate the concept. To be clear, renewables don’t pay the costs of the intermittency they cause to the system; they don’t pay for the additional capacity needed to meet an expected peak demand; they don’t pay for the extra transmission and distribution networks required; and there need to be lots of wind turbines and lots of solar panels to replicate the power output (when the wind is blowing and the sun shining) of a gas turbine."
Read this article, its time well spent!
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