I can find plenty of sources saying that it isn’t profitable (there are too many to list here). I did look after reading his comment and found exactly 0 credible sources showing that it is currently profitable without subsidies today, and I looked again after reading your comment and still found nothing even when using the exact search you suggested. In fact the entire SERP for the one you suggested, with the exception of one article that suggests that offshore wind power might soon be profitable, has links to articles essentially saying that wind power is economically doomed.
Am I (along with the rest of the world, who would be dancing in the streets, dedicating trillions of dollars to deploying wind towers in every corner of the earth at this very moment, and writing thousands of credible articles about how the world’s energy problems have been solved if this were true) missing something?
Edit: the green folks are coming in and downvoting these comments like crazy. Could one of you please justify your downvote by replying with a link to a credible article that shows wind energy to be profitable without subsidies in non-exceptional places? I think everyone would love to see it, including myself! Google doesn’t seem to know about this very special, world-changing article. Perhaps it is protected with an overly aggressive robots.txt.
Wind farms in Northern Europe likely wouldn't break even without government subsidies. The maintenance of turbines, especially off-shore ones, is very expensive. They are also quite pricey per unit for relatively humble power output.
The UK has very large amounts of offshore wind, unfortunately it isn't enough and we're not developing more capacity fast enough. It doesn't help that the government has utterly screwed the incentives:
Onshore windfarms are a hard sell. I think the UK has great potential to expend offshore windfarms, which are a much easier sell (most people won't mind).
The title of the WSJ article is misleading. An offshore wind farm does not power more than 1 million homes, unless you only want electricity when the wind is blowing.
Offshore wind is one of the most expensive sources of electricity generation--more expensive than every except solar thermal. https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm Offshore wind is more than twice as expensive as onshore wind.
The fact that the U.K. is pushing offshore wind is one reason why the U.K's electricity rates are much higher than in the U.S. The U.K.'s electricity rates about about $0.22 per kwh [1] compared to an average of $0.13 in the U.S. [2]
As far as I know, this is not true. On a small scale wind has been profitable for a long time. In The Netherlands, small scale commercial wind turbines go back a long time. As far as I know there were no subsidies back then.
As I demonstrated in my comment, Hinkley Point C, even with its massive cost overruns (and true, nobody knows if that's the final cost yet, but that's the current figure), is roughly on par with offshore wind in cost per installed GW after accounting for capacity factors. It's just that Hickley Point C will have as much capacity as the entire north sea offshore wind fleet (all countries, not just UK), and so the concentrated single number gets very big. And wind is massively subsidised, too, so the subsidy is not an argument in itself.
Side note: From a Danish point of view, the price level for offshore wind you've been agreeing to in the UK has seemed... very high. Of course, location etc. is different, but still.
There was a single offshore wind farm in Denmark in the high price range, where a government that had previously decided man-made warming was a hoax suddenly reversed their direction and decided it needed the farm built quickly, ending up with a single bidder.
But in any case this has finally ended.
FYI: Not long ago, DONG won a bid on a subsidy-free offshore farm in Germany. IIRC, they have until 2020 to decide whether they're going to build it or not, but they'll have to pay a fee if they don't.
It is not cost-effective to build much wind power in Norway, because of excessive cheap hydro power. Statoil and Statkraft build them in UK, where the price and subsidies are more favourable.
Hah. There's actually an interesting UK-specific quirk that the comment you're replying to has missed: if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the 2000s using more subsidies that wouldn't actually save us money, because those subsidies weren't structured as CfDs. They were just outright direct subsidy payments on top of the market price of electricity which is set by the most expensive generator needed to fil demand (usually gas). So building more back then could actually have lead to higher power bills even though they should be cheaper.
Newer wind farms don't have this problem only because we ended up with a big-C Conservative government that restructured the subsidies for new projects sometime around the 2013-2016 period as CfDs at prices which are now substantially lower than the market cost of electricity. That government is generally portrayed as pretty much the archtypical example of pro-austerity, anti-green, anti-investment "fiscal conservatives" who let corporations benefit at our expense. From the news reporting you'd think that they were the ones which structured deals in ways that let energy producers get undeserved windfall profits. The media even let Ed Milliband, who was actually in charge of energy when the opposition Labour party were last in power, blame them for the fact that these windfall profits are happening without challenging him on his own role in those contracts.
>Wind has been profitable for years and years even without government handouts
Please cite your credible source saying that wind energy is currently profitable in practice without subsidies in more than a tiny fraction of areas on earth.
_YB15.png){kind=link}
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/14/wind-farm-or...
reply