A few years ago we had a bit of a chat about the relative price of solar and wind power installations. At that time, solar was about 50% more expensive, like for like.

It seems that the gap has widened considerably since then, going by the stickers on some of the major plants recently. Wind power prices have come down, and solar has stagnated. It may be that there are differences in running costs but in the scheme of things these are usually very minor compared to the cost of construction. Here are some plants with (expected) completion dates and USD per mean watt.

Topaz Solar Farm, USA (PV, 2014)
Mean output 125 MW
Price 2.5 billion USD
20 USD per mean W

California Valley Solar Ranch, USA (PV, 2013)
Mean output 62.5 MW
Price 1.6 billion USD
25.6 USD per mean W

Solarpark Meuro, Germany (PV, 2012)
Mean output 18 MW
Price 332 M Euro, (411 million USD)
22.8 USD per mean W

Ivanpah, USA (Thermal tower, 2014)
Mean output 122 MW
Price 2.2 billion USD
18 USD per mean W

Solana, USA (Thermal trough, 2013)
Mean output 108 MW
Price 2 billion USD
18.5 USD per mean W

Andasol, Spain (Thermal trough, 2011)
Mean output 56 MW
Price 900 million Euro (1.11 billion USD)
19.8 USD per mean W

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Alta Wind Energy Center, USA (onshore 2012)
Mean output 305 MW
Price 1.2 billion USD
3.9 USD per mean W

Shepherds Flat, USA (onshore 2012)
Mean output 228 MW
Price 2.0 billion USD
8.7 USD per mean W

Roscoe, USA (onshore 2009)
Mean output 234 MW
Price 1.4 billion USD
5.98 USD per mean W

Taralga, Australia (onshore 2015)
Mean output 42 MW
Price 265 m AUD (227 USD)
5.40 USD per mean W

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Greater Gabbbard, UK (offshore 2012)
Mean output 201 MW
Price 650 m GBP (1017 USD)
5.06 USD per mean W

Anholt, Danish (offshore 2013)
Mean output 190 MW
Price 1.65 billion USD
8.65 USD per mean W
____

There’s considerable variation between projects but it does seem that large scale solar is now about 2.5 times as expensive as large scale wind. Solar thermal is consistently cheaper than PV, and the solar thermal projects can be given some points because they tend to have attached thermal storage as part of the project.

Renewable Energy – Solar and Wind-Power: capital costs and effectiveness compared

The_observer said:

!http://energytransition.de/files/2014/09/eroiranking.png

What is EROI?

energy return on investment

Boris said:

energy return on investment

Thanks.

Whereas wind turbines are able to “pay back their energy debt” in around half a year (6.6 months), photovoltaics take several years.
https://sites.google.com/site/anatomyofglobalclimatechangevj/data-and-analysis

The energy return on investment for wind turbines is in the range from 50 to 100.

There seems to be a fair bit of variability in different peoples estimates of the cost of these things (even from the same web site):

The price of new nuclear revisited

[quote=dv] Whereas wind turbines are able to "pay back their energy debt" in around half a year (6.6 months), photovoltaics take several years. "https://sites.google.com/site/anatomyofglobalclimatechangevj/data-and-analysis":https://sites.google.com/site/anatomyofglobalclimatechangevj/data-and-analysis The energy return on investment for wind turbines is in the range from 50 to 100. [/quote] your link says 36.5:1 EROI The EROI graph from above is from this paper "Energy intensities, EROIs, and energy payback times of electricitgenerating power plants D. Weißbacha, G. Ruprechta, A. Hukea, K. Czerskia, S. Gottlieba, A. Husseina":http://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf 7.4. Wind energy Corrected EROI 16 Corrected EROI, buffered 4 In comparison to that, Lenzen [35] presented many EROIs on an electrical output basis from several studies though they calculated the amortization time by using the primary energy equivalent of the electrical output. In general, they are similar (10 to 25) to the results here. Most papers Lenzens evaluation is based on investigated very small plants which are not suitable for a large-scale energy supply due to land consumption, or are based on top-down analyses. Four works are picked out here because they looked at wind turbines with a similar peak power or which calculated very high EROIs: Kuemmel [36], G¨urzenich [37], Krohn [38] and Roth [39]. Kuemmel selected an elevated load compared to this work, the material inventories for glass fibre and copper are remarkably low and some energy-intensive materials (electric sheets, lacquers) are missing. Taking this into account, the EROI will lower from 50 to 20 at the same location used in this paper – this is in roughly good agreement to the results here. G¨urzenich placed the E-66 turbine already analysed by Hagedorn and later by Geuder [32] at a very special onshore location in India with an extremely high load of 4000 peak hours, double as high as used here. This, of course, results in a EROI twice as high, so one can see how important it is to set equal conditions for all techniques to make them comparable. Krohn made a top-down calculation and also used a coastal offshore location (Denmark) where the turbine gains high loads, resulting in an EROI of 33, twice as large as the results here. Remarkably, Lenzen cited an EROI of 45 for a 300 kW turbine from Roth [39] but in Roths paper, only an EROI of 10 is determined. The selection of the location depends on the area which has to be supplied by the wind turbines and must represent the load possibilities reachable there, so, for comparison reasons, it is not suitable here to select arbitrary locations. One should also consider that all works did not take buffering into account.

Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work

A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.

According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;

“At the start of REC, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists. We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

There is simply no get out clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.

The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. >>> EROEI <<< This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.

There’s a similar ratio between the times to pay off the “CO2 debt” for wind and solar, but the actual amount of time varies with the carbon intensity of the energy used in the manufacture, and the carbon intensity of the energy that the windpower is considered to replace. These may not be identical.

In a market like Australia’s, you’re still looking at about half a year for wind turbines to pay back their emissions debt, and five to ten years for PVs.

dv said:

In a market like Australia’s, you’re still looking at about half a year for wind turbines to pay back their emissions debt, and five to ten years for PVs.

How does 10 to 20 times factor tie in with the chart I posted, which suggested that solar and wind costs are the same order of magnitude?

Why would the source of the energy replaced be significantly different on average, between solar and wind?

The Rev Dodgson said:

dv said:

In a market like Australia’s, you’re still looking at about half a year for wind turbines to pay back their emissions debt, and five to ten years for PVs.

How does 10 to 20 times factor tie in with the chart I posted, which suggested that solar and wind costs are the same order of magnitude?

To answer that, i’d need to do more research, but at the risk of stating the obvious, energy is not the only price of the input. Certainly, regardless of the cause of the difference between cost ratio and energy or emissions payback time ratio, it’s consistently documented.

Why would the source of the energy replaced be significantly different on average, between solar and wind?

In my post about emissions debt, I said that the payback time was much higher for PV than wind, but that the actual value of the payback time will depend on the emissions intensity of the input and the emissions intensity of the power being replaced.

Eg (and just to pull some figures out of the air as an illustration) if your plant gear is manufactured in France and used in Victoria, the emissions payback on wind turbines might be four months and for PV might be three years. If vice versa, the time for WT might be a year and the that for PV nine years. I say this because of the great difference in emissions intensity of the electrical energy in France versus Victoria.

I expect the ratio of the PV-emssions-debt-payback-time to WT-emissions-debt-payback-time to be about the same regardless of the above.

(Though note that fossil fuels are often used directly in the manufacture of steel and silicon: again, giving good numbers on this would require more careful analysis.)