As the annoying person on the windmill farm tour and on a tour of Boulder Dam, I was told the generation cost of the windmill farm was 12 cents per KWH, and the hydro plant locals were paying 6.8 cents per KWH all charges included delivered. That was a decade or so ago, as far as green power goes, hydro kicks butt. It is all on the maintenance costs. It is easy and cheap to control the turbine speed with hydro electric, to deliver 60hz power with wind power, that is expensive. The turbines are all in a very open room that climbing a story of stairs gets to a platform to work on them. I am sure working on a windmill is harder and more costly. Go ahead and explain where I am wrong, I am all ears.
Yes hydro kicks butt
Please propose a new dam site
Your information is a decade or more old
Wind without subsidies is cheaper than gas
It is now 'cheaper' to build new wind turbines than to just 'run' a Coal plant
Oh, and when Putin invades foreign countries, the price of wind doesn't go up
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...d-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies
he reason, in short, is the subsidies worked. After decades of quotas, tax breaks and feed-in-tariffs, wind and solar have been deployed widely enough for manufacturers and developers to become increasingly efficient and drive down costs. The cost of wind power has fallen about 50% since 2010. Solar has dropped 85%. That makes them cheaper than new coal and gas plants in two-thirds of the world, according to BloombergNEF
Renewable Energy Prices Hit Record Lows: How Can Utilities Benefit From Unstoppable Solar And Wind?
.Over the last decade, wind energy prices have fallen 70% and solar photovoltaics have fallen 89% on average, according to Lazard's 2019 report. Utility-scale renewable energy prices are now significantly below those for coal and gas generation, and they're less than half the cost of nuclear. The latest numbers again confirm that building new clean energy generation is cheaper than running existing coal plants.
In other words, it is now cheaper to save the climate than to destroy it. Capacity installation trends reflect this economic reality, with new wind and solar generation coming online at a breakneck pace. Wind power capacity in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2010 and reached nearly 100 GW in 2018.
In Lazard's LCOE analysis, unsubsidized wind power and utility-scale solar come in at lower price ranges than any other analyzed resource including gas, coal, and nuclear. Unsubsidized wind ranges from $28–$54 per megawatt hour (MWh), and unsubsidized utility-scale solar ranges from $32–$42/MWh. Factoring in subsidies, wind prices plunge to $11–$45/MWh and utility-scale solar prices stay relatively stable at $31–$40/MWh.