Inflation doing a good job, what single earner family can have more then 1 kid these days?
Govs all panicking about population dropping but it should be the natural path as productivity grows.
Will certainly help with carbon reduction.
The subject was high priced wind. Especially off shore. Consumers in NY were spared for now of constantly increasing electric bills due the reluctance of paying for further billions in subsidies, Calculations of shore based towers are as much as 10 times less to develop.
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Onshore wind parks are cheaper to construct, but less efficient and more NIMBYs around.
Here from the UK reality:
PS> The rated capacity of turbines installed onshore is limited by several factors and not likely to increasing much in the future.
The capacity of wind turbines installed offshore has increases from 3.5mW to 12-15mW in the last decade and is likely to reach 20 mW in the near future:
Not only is building offshore expensive , the cost to maintain them is incredibly high as well.
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The cost comparison in “per mW installed” for OWFs vs onshore are not that bad:
https://guidetoanoffshorewindfarm.com/wind-farm-costs
Even maintenance costs are not that bad when each offshore turbine produce 4-5X as much power as each onshore turbine.
Respectfully disagree bug.
It should be a matter of math not of opinion. There is value in looking at this in terms of LCOE.
There was a useful report from Lazard from April of this year comparing LCOE across solar, wind-onshore, wind-offshore, gas, nuclear, coal, and combined cycle, using US data. With Lazard being a company that financially advises large energy companies (some folks here might recall their restructuring of most GOM offshore drillers in the last decade) I find it unlikely they are greenwashing the numbers.
Lots of variables, of which that report points out those they include and don’t include. They offer comparison with and without subsidies, and new-build vs existing. For new build, without subsidies, offshore wind is cheaper than gas, nuc, and competitive or nearly cheaper than coal.
They peg the onshore vs offshore levelized cost difference in the range of upwards of 2x. Maintenance looks about 2-3x.
Of course compared to existing nuc and the shear cost of new nuc it certainly makes the case for keeping old nuc plants alive and kicking too.
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Couple of offshore projects being walked away from:
The ones in Iowa are being cut up now, actually. Or will be within the next couple weeks.