More "windmills" Please

[kpete]

Trump: "I am for massive oil and gas and everything else...Putin can't love that." "...But Hillary was not for a strong military. And Hillary, my opponent, was for windmills."

Link to tweet

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New Colorado wind farms with batteries are now cheaper than running old coal plants


Solar, wind, and battery prices are dropping so fast that, in Colorado, building new renewable power plus battery storage is now cheaper than running old coal plants. This increasingly renders existing coal plants obsolete.

Two weeks ago, Xcel Energy quietly reported dozens of shockingly low bids it had received for building new solar and wind farms, many with battery storage (see table below).


The median bid price in 2017 for wind plus battery storage was $21 per megawatt-hour, which is 2.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. As Carbon Tracker noted, this “appears to be lower than the operating cost of all coal plants currently in Colorado.”

The median bid price for solar plus battery storage was $36/MWh (3.6 cents/kwh), which may be lower than about three-fourths of operating coal capacity. For context, the average U.S. residential price for electricity is 12 cents/kWh.



https://thinkprogress.org/colorado-wind-batteries-cheap-12e82b91a543/

[genxlib]

1. I am not sure this means what they say it means

There seems to be a confusion between generating capacity and actual cost of power. In order to get one from the other, you would have to amortize the development cost over a set period of time and then add maintenance costs.

It still seems to be good news but is very confusing. The way it is stated, the installation would pay for itself in a matter of days.

Whatever, I will take it as generically positive news and not sweat the details.