FOLLOW-UP TO MY PREVIOUS POST ON CALCULATING THE COST OF WIND AND SOLAR IN NEW ENGLAND

Based on New Information

I am submitting this post to provide a clarification to my most recent post, “Is the All-In Cost of Wind and Solar Generation Really Considerably Higher Than the Cost of Conventional Generation,” which discussed an article recently posted on the Energy Bad Boys substack (energybadboys.substack.com) titled “Wind and Solar up to 12 TIMES More Expensive Than Natural Gas in New England.” My article noted several apparent anomalies in the calculations presented in the Energy Bad Boys post, but I also noted that many details were missing that might explain the apparent anomalies.

Shortly after posting that article, I received a comment from Isaac Orr, one of the two authors of the Energy Bad Boys substack. I should say that Energy Bad Boys is one of my favorite substacks dealing with electric grid issues. I don’t agree with everything they say, but then I don’t agree with everything anyone says (just ask my wife). Their articles are always thought provoking and backed up with intelligent analysis. I did not intend for my post to represent an attack on them but merely noted what appeared to me to be anomalies in their cost calculations.

In any event, Isaac noted in his comment that the cost calculations in the Energy Bad Boys’ article were based on a report (“The Staggering Costs of New England’s Green Energy Policies”) that supported their previous post (“$815 Billion: The Cost of Going Green in New England”) which explained the detailed modeling he and others had done showing that New England’s Green Energy Policies could cost $815 billion by 2050. A link to this report also was included in the second paragraph of their post that my article addressed.

I highly recommend this report to anyone who is interested in the transition to a low carbon grid. It does a good job explaining how you should figure out how a transition could be implemented without threatening grid reliability. As relevant here, the report explains why a tremendous overbuilding of wind and solar facilities would be required under the green energy policies of the New England states, especially given the current moratoriums (I know that technically, it is moratoria) on new nuclear generation facilities in those states. The report projects that, to comply with low carbon policies in New England there will need to be 225,400 megawatts of capacity constructed in 2050 in New England—about 200,000 megawatts of which would be wind and solar—to serve a peak of 57,000 megawatts of load. This represents almost four times as much capacity than of peak load, whereas today most systems need only about 15% more capacity than load to provide reliable service.

What I learned from reading the report is that the cost per megawatt-hour (MWh) calculations that were in the Energy Bad Boys post do not represent a comparison of the costs of wind and solar facilities today with the costs of conventional coal and natural gas facilities today. Rather, it represents a comparison of the costs of coal and gas facilities today with the costs of the 200,000 megawatts of wind and solar capacity in 2050 that the Energy Bad Boys predict would be required to comply with New England low carbon policies. The costs of such extreme overbuilding dramatically increase the cost/MWh of wind and solar facilities, and thus the apparent anomalies in the comparisons that I noted have no validity because the coal and natural gas calculations are not really comparable to the wind and solar calculations. I would note that the Energy Bad Boys did not make clear in their article what was being compared. I had to look at the description of the same calculations in the report itself to figure this out. Perhaps they might want to edit their post to explain what the comparison involves.

But the same factors that undermine the validity of my comparisons also undermine the usefulness of the comparisons the Energy Bad Boys presented. That the cost of wind and solar in 2050 could be as much as 12 times higher than the cost of natural gas generation facilities today doesn’t really tell us much of any use because the cost calculations are not really comparable. Rather, if the point is to consider the costs imposed by New England low carbon policies, what would be useful would be to compare the costs of reliably serving load in 2050 under the New England low carbon policies to the costs of reliably serving load in 2050 without those policies. The Energy Big Boys’ report predicts that peak load in New England will more than double by 2050, going from 23,000 megawatts in 2023 to 57,000 megawatts in 2050. Meeting this greatly increased load is one of the drivers of the high costs of wind and solar the Energy Bad Boys predict, but it will require an expensive infrastructure build no matter what type of new generation facilities are installed.

I have no doubt that the cost of serving 57,000 megawatts of load in 2050 without having to rely almost exclusively on wind and solar facilities would be less than the cost of meeting that load by building and operating 200,000 megawatts of wind and solar. But I don’t have a good feel for the magnitude of the difference. I don’t want to suggest that doing such a comparison would be easy. To the contrary calculating the cost of serving load in 2050 without low carbon policies would require all kinds of difficult and speculative assumptions about what generation facilities would be constructed and what they would cost. But if we really want to understand the cost consequences of New England’s low carbon policies, this is the comparison that would be required.

I still have some questions about the cost calculations for wind and solar in 2050 that are presented in the Energy Bad Boys post. I am going to provide them to Isaac Orr in the next day or so. Depending on the answers, I may or may not follow up with a new post. I am not sure how much anyone reading my substack really cares about the technical nuts and bolts of energy cost calculations, and will not say anything more on the subject unless I think I can make it interesting and understandable.

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