I understand there is installation, maintenance and servicing costs, but shouldn’t the free power from the sun, wind and tidal eventually pay this off and start providing free power?
In: Engineering
… green energy. Do you even know what that is? It is energy that is called “green”. Such meaningless marketing buzzwords serve the purpose of getting people to shell out more money.
Just an example but large offshore windfarms for example can cost many Billions of dollars.
Because you’re looking at marginal cost instead of total cost. Marginal cost is very small compared to total coat. It’s easy to think drilling for coal and oil costs money while wind and solar are ‘free’. But the vast majority of costs is building the wires, transformers, infrastructure, etc. Every new human that needs electricity adds to the need of new wires.
Even if we had nearly infinite free energy from fusion, and could copy paste that over the whole world right now, the infrastructure itself degrades over time.
It gets more expensive to do basic stuff. We still rely on copper, steel, wood, human labor. Those aren’t getting any cheaper.
We need to set the cost of electricity appropriately to make sure the infrastructure’s future
is fully funded.
It’s a massive problem if utility companies fuck up and suddenly can’t pay for the basics like maintenance crews and new transformers and tree trimming or other reliability countermeasures
Where I live, energy generation is dominated by renewables and the price of electricity has GONE DOWN inflation adjusted since 2018. The government-documented price for heating a home with natural gas has GONE UP by 70% including inflation since 2018.
Renewable are finance over a twenty year period so rate payers have to pay for that. About 50% of your rate is to pay for the distribution and transmission so that’s not going away. Right now the price of natural gas is high because of demand for LNG from Europe. Maybe in about ten years from now you may start to see decrease in your electric utility bills.
ELI5
what you don’t count is that solar panels and wind mills don’t have unlimited lifespan. Eventually, they needs to be replaced. So all of the installation, maintenance and servicing costs needs to be redone maybe every 30 years and in that time there is limited amount of energy it can make.
My electricity has been dropping for the last 14 years. Guess it depends where you live for one thing.
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