Timeline for If grid parity has already been reached, why is it so expensive to switch to renewable energy?
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16 events
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| Jan 8, 2020 at 15:21 | comment | added | gerrit | @Sjoerd Read carefully: I didn't call CO₂ air pollution, I wrote fossil fuel burning has external costs due to "air pollution or climate change". The former has current external costs, the latter has future external costs (and increasingly, current external costs due to past activities). It is true that it is difficult to quantify economically the external costs per unit of emitted CO₂e, the best we have is summarised in IPCC AR5 WG2 and WG3. Reducing fossil fuel burning will usually reduce both air pollution and climate change. | |
| Jan 8, 2020 at 14:55 | comment | added | Sjoerd | @gerrit which is just a number taken out of thin air (pun intended) everyone can tweak to support their side of the argument. BTW, CO2 isn't poisonous at the current levels at all - if anything at all, it helps plants grow - so I wouldn't call that "pollution." | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 16:48 | comment | added | gerrit | The biggest fossil fuel subsidy is the externality, paid either by current generations due to air pollution or future generations due to climate change. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 15:09 | comment | added | LShaver | @Fizz I agree, and I'm not advocating that PV subsidies be ignored in any analysis. But I believe it's important to understand that while PV subsidies are large and transparent, fossil fuel subsidies also exist and have a measurable effect on the costs of PV in the market. It's just that they've been around for decades and are harder to quantify. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 15:00 | comment | added | 264 champagne bottles on ice | @LShaver: "relative" doesn't mean "the same". It matters which subsidy is greater per MW. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 14:51 | comment | added | Sjoerd | @LShaver By the reasoning, VAT is already distorting the market. No matter how you define "subsidy", PV is subsidized more per kWh generated than coal in Germany. But we won't resolve this in the comment section. "Fossiil fuel subsidies" are a talking point for the green parties, and they have so many links they can use, that there is always another one to drop when somebody finds a fault in the original link. Every link I looked into had faults, usually in the form of labelling general tax breaks as a fossil fuel subsidy. So I don't buy those arguments anymore. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 14:45 | comment | added | LShaver | @Sjoerd there's more information here. Regardless of how the subsidy is paid out and who gets it, the price of coal is being distorted in the market, which affects the chances of PV in the market. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 14:38 | comment | added | Sjoerd | @LShaver According to that very limited leaflet you linked, Germany gives subsidies to regions affected by the phasing out of coal mining. I wouldn't count that as subsidizing coal, but your leaflet does. And likely the 'tax relief' they refer to, is a generic tax relief available to all businesses, so not a specific coal subsidy. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 14:32 | comment | added | LShaver | Germany also subsidizes coal, so the impact of PV subsidies should be relative. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 9:35 | comment | added | origimbo | @MSalters I suspect a lot of that is the difference between onshore and offshore production. Offshore it's been a race to get as big as possible to maximise efficiency, however on-shore (where most turbines still are, even in countries with a large offshore resource) things are 1) older and 2) smaller. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 8:20 | comment | added | MSalters | 2 and 5 MW? That sounds low. The new Dutch wind farms (Borssele I-IV) use 8MW and 9.5 MW turbines. The driver is that large turbines lower the cost per GW. And of course, if you buy 100.000 of them, installation costs drop due to scale advantages. | |
| Jan 7, 2020 at 6:00 | history | edited | 264 champagne bottles on ice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 7, 2020 at 5:50 | history | edited | 264 champagne bottles on ice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 7, 2020 at 5:08 | history | edited | 264 champagne bottles on ice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 7, 2020 at 3:53 | history | edited | 264 champagne bottles on ice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 7, 2020 at 3:18 | history | answered | 264 champagne bottles on ice | CC BY-SA 4.0 |