Surfing the web I have run into two different articles that claim good news for my two favourite renewable sources, wind and solar.
First one is a nice scientific article that has studied plenty electric power plant projects and focused on two outputs: the economic and time deviations from the plannification. Mean cost scalation shows a 66.3% overran per Project. A further analysis of the different categories (hydro, nuclear, solar, wind and thermal) exhibits clear petterns in each of them. Firslty, long term projects are more likely to suffer both time and budget deviations due to changes in the demand, in the legislation (specially affecting nuclear power plants), currency variations or change of scope. This leads to a 117% overrun in nuclear reactor projects, 70% in hydroelectric dams and 12% in thermal plans. At the other end wind projects just had an overrun of 7.7% and solar ones an underrun of -1.2%. Time overrun usually has a high correlation with the economic one. Some causes of such a low figures in wind and solar, besides the smaller timespan, are that those projects are usually controlled by a single one company, and the huge development the technology has undergone.
The second article released in the New York Times talks about wind and solar catching up fossil power plants in production costs. Until recently renewable energy prices were made possible by generous subsides, which could son diminish or expire. However recent analyses show that even without those subsidies, alternative energies can often compete with traditional sources.
Gathering together both articles, looks like renewable enegies are no longer more expensive and even safer finantially. There is still one big obstacle to overcome: we can’t dispatch them when we want to, they are essentially intermittent. Therefore the system still needs to balance them with conventional sources that guarantee the supply 24/7. Nevertheless, reaching production costs equity and lowering investing risk is an enormous step.
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