Price of US Wind Energy at 'All-Time Low' of 2.5 Cents per Kilowatt-Hour

It's difficult to compete if you can't calculate or agree on the true cost of your product.  That sometimes seems the plight of the wind and solar power industries.

A just-released Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report pegs utility-scale wind power-purchase agreement pricing as averaging $25 per megawatt-hour for projects that negotiated contracts in 2013.  That's cheap power.

But, as Stephen Lacey asked in a recent podcast, how do we calculate the true cost of intermittent renewables?

Lacey and The Energy Gang debated the findings of a recent study from the Brookings Institution that concluded that the costs of wind and solar "are higher than presumed when using a cost-benefit calculation model."  The Economist picked up that Brookings report, which ranked solar PV last and wind next to last, while gas and nuclear led the rankings.

The Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins contributed an article to Greentech Media arguing that the Brookings Institution paper’s conclusions were wrong -- the fruits of an analysis based on "outdated or otherwise incorrect data."  Lovins wrote that the author "assumed solar and wind to be more expensive and less productive than they actually are, and conversely assumed nuclear and gas combined-cycle to be less expensive and (for gas) more productive than they actually are.  All knobs got turned in exactly the wrong directions."

Lovins also pointed out that the low cost of wind is "consistent with real-world observations, such as when utility Xcel Energy proposed adding 550 megawatts of wind capacity to its system last year -- not due to environmental motivations or state renewable-energy mandates, but because new wind power was the cheapest supply option from a list that included gas combined-cycle.  Solar and wind similarly beat new gas plants in California electricity auctions."

So, the most recent DOE analysis finds that wind power is at 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, an "all-time low."  One of the authors of the report, Berkeley Lab Staff Scientist Ryan Wiser, wrote, “This is especially notable because, enabled by technology advancements, wind projects have increasingly been built in lower-wind-speed areas.”

Price of US Wind Energy at 'All-Time Low' of 2.5 Cents per Kilowatt-Hour