Senators Who Voted To Protect Oil Tax Breaks Received $23,582,500 From Big Oil

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7. It's actually more complicated than that

The initial cost of renewables is high - about double what a combined cycle gas turbine plant costs and they do require maintenance. Things like power conditioning systems, inverters, gearboxes, etc, do wear out and need to be replaced. Keep in mind that natural gas prices are currently very low and are projected to stay that way for the foreseeable future. That means that a gas plant can turn out some pretty cheap megawatt-hours. At current prices, a gas plant could probably generate electricity for about $30 - $35 per megawatt-hour. Even with substantial tax credits, wind energy is still probably north of $50 and solar is more expensive than that

Aside from cost, the biggest problem with wind and solar is the inability to match the generation to the load. With conventional generation, system operators raise and lower the output of the generation to match changes in the load. This keeps the power grid stable. Wind and solar cannot be controlled that way which becomes a big problem as the amount of wind and solar on the grid increases.. If only a little is online and the wind stops blowing, it's not a big deal - operators can easily increase the output of conventional generators to make up for it. Same thing for a little solar on the grid when the sun goes behind a cloud. It's very different if the renewable energy is supplying say 40% or 50% of the load and it suddenly drops to only supplying say 15% or 20%. The operators will need to have a lot of spinning reserve (immediately available generating capacity) to make up for the loss. That is expensive and must be factored into the cost of using renewable energy.

In a similar way, you also have to deal with situations where the sun is not shining (nightime) or when the wind is not blowing at all. That means you need a method of storing the renewable energy for use at that time or you need to bring conventional generation online or you need to shed load. There is a substantial cost associated with all of those approaches.

There is a lot of work being done to deal with these issues - battery storage technologies, compressed air energy storage, pumped hydro , flywheels and other technologies are in development that will help address these problems, but they will not be cheap and implementation might take decades.

Personally, I believe it makes more sense to maximize our use of natural gas for power generation and to move our heavy trucks and buses. Directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing have opened up vast reserves of natural gas. We need to improve the extraction methods to extract the gas safely, but I believe that can be done.