> is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers?
We do not have a spare universe without such additions to answer that question.
Hornsea Project 1 (1.2GW nameplate electricity generation from wind turbines in the North Sea) is running right now and is paid £140 per MWh under CfD terms. So, on a nice fresh day that's £168 000 per hour.
In 2019 you could say that's a ludicrous subsidy, the market price for electricity in the UK was about £50 per MWh so the government (and thus rate payers ultimately) are paying about 200% extra to subsidise this wind farm.
On the other hand, today (in January 2022) the market price is fluctuating closer to £200 per MWh due to gas prices and so £140 per MWh looks like a bargain.
[ The way Contracts for Difference works is you sell your electricity like everybody else, via some mix of long term and short term contracts, and the government tops up the difference between the market price and your "strike price" so that your income is always determined by your strike price not subject to changes in the market price. This also means if market prices are higher (as they often have been this past year) you pay the government back the difference so you still only get the income your strike price guaranteed. As a result the risk of not generating electricity stays with you, as does the risk of not selling your electricity for market prices but the government eats your risk that market prices are far lower than you expected while also gobbling up any windfall profits if market prices are far higher ]
Now, if Hornsea and similar wind farms don't exist, does the UK magically pay the same price £140 per MWh for that electricity even though gas is expensive and it has no other source of electricity ? Or do the prices go up even further? Maybe with no other choice the UK buys electricity for £300 per MWh or even £500 per MWh. The lights must stay on after all.
Also there are secondary effects. If you propose a new wind farm today, to start construction in 2024 and be online in 2030, you're not going to get a strike price of £140 per MWh because of course prices came down due to investment in the sector. But if there was no investment, why wouldn't you find wind farms in 2030 just as expensive as they were in 2015 ? And not only did prices come down, efficiency went up as suppliers gained experience and competed to offer better products, when Hornsea was proposed a 8MW turbine was best-in-class, Hornsea Project 2 intends up to 15MW turbines. The taller structure offers not only more peak power output, it also delivers higher capacity factor because high altitude winds are more constant.
The problem is that battery costs are so expensive that to get that kW of unreliable power, you need to build a kW of reliable power to back it up. Then rates swing from the very cheap kW when the sun is shining and there are few clouds to the expensive rate on cloudy days or night, and at the end of the day you have to pay for double the capacity. That's why electricity rates go up on average after the introduction of cheap unreliable power.
The production of cheap, long lasting batteries that can be deployed at mass scale and survive large numbers of power cycles is the missing link between cheap unreliable power and actually realized lower costs. So people are declaring victory citing the unreliable rates while electricity consumers are faced with much higher costs. We don't have that victory yet.
Commercial capacity is free. There are no subsidies for building gas turbines. If they want to build more, gambling that they'll be used when the winds are calm and the skies are dark, they're welcome to try to get investment for that.
Looking at the cost of wholesale electricity supply (rather than the price households pay for "units" of electricity) I do not see your "up on average" for introducing "cheap unreliable power".
Ofgem says in June 2010 wholesale electricity cost £42.18 per MWh. By June 2015 that was £41.66 and by June 2020 it was... £28.42
However a year later in June 2021 it was £79.85. Now, what happened between June 2020 and June 2021 ? Did we install a lot more solar panels, build a huge wind farm? No, Vladimir Putin began squeezing Europe's supply of natural gas.
Ofgem even has a gas price chart next to the electricity charts so you can see this obvious correlation.
Gas prices went up, and they're going to stay up unless you think Putin is suddenly going to decide he's happy for Ukraine to join NATO and put American troops on his border.
If you need natural gas for its chemical properties this just sucks, too bad. But many more of us are using it for heating or electricity and those are things we can move away from gas, insulating ourselves from this problem and helping to fight global warming.
The reason why you need to look at what households pay is because the electricity companies are the ones who need to deal with the volatility and what they charge to customers is the price of reliable energy. Wholesale prices are very volatile, but residential prices are much more stable, reflecting an average of wholesale prices. So it is better to sample them than to sample the random noise of wholesale prices.
I also disagree thoroughly with the idea that you can take 3 samples from statistical noise and deduce an average, as you have done.
I also think it's laughable that natural gas prices are controlled by Putin. That's a deep rabbit hole you've fallen into, as it's a global market, and natural gas prices respond to general supply and demand, not the dictates of Putin "squeezing" anyone. In particular, when there is less wind or Europe takes a coal plant offline, for example, then demand for natural gas goes up. Now what do you think happens to the price when demand goes up? The idea that high natural gas prices are dictated by some shadowy enemy, rather than lack of substitutes such as wind, oil, and coal, is not a good analysis of the problem. Frankly it sounds a lot like those who says inflation is caused by "corporate greed" rather than an expansion of the money supply.
In general, please avoid blaming changes to prices on political enemies, as that's pure misinformation. It does not elucidate or explain any actual cause of price changes. It literally makes people less informed, less able to understand the world around them. It's the opposite of what we should be trying to do.
> The reason why you need to look at what households pay is because the electricity companies are the ones who need to deal with the volatility and what they charge to customers is the price of reliable energy.
Nope. The price households pay is "capped" by government policy. Bread and circuses my friend. The result of electricity companies being unable to "deal with the volatility" is that they go bankrupt, if you'd followed that Ogem link it probably highlighted that it has information for UK consumers worried what happens when their supplier goes bankrupt, as huge numbers have (the answer is, in very short term future, nothing important since of course the retail electricity companies don't actually supply any electricity to anybody, they're just an artificial construct).
> I also disagree thoroughly with the idea that you can take 3 samples from statistical noise and deduce an average, as you have done.
I linked Ofgem's site which shows you all this data over an extended period, I just gave you three examples to save on reading, and you... averaged them and then complained this is statistical noise.
> I also think it's laughable that natural gas prices are controlled by Putin.
Laughable or not, Putin in practice controls the Russian company Gazprom which supplies most of Europe's natural gas. That company chose to supply only the bare minimum of what was contracted, even though its buyers would like to buy closer to the upper end of their contract range. Because politically this is in Putin's interest.
Now of course Britain, far from Russia and with its own oil fields and other sources, is not directly depending on Russia for gas, unlike several other important European countries, however, you correctly notice that supply and demand influences pricing. For Britain's neighbour's who can't get Russian gas the British gas is suddenly very attractive, raising its prices, and thus we're back to where we began, Putin is ultimately why you can see that big spike in the Ofgem charts that you are pretending is "just noise"...
We do not have a spare universe without such additions to answer that question.
Hornsea Project 1 (1.2GW nameplate electricity generation from wind turbines in the North Sea) is running right now and is paid £140 per MWh under CfD terms. So, on a nice fresh day that's £168 000 per hour.
In 2019 you could say that's a ludicrous subsidy, the market price for electricity in the UK was about £50 per MWh so the government (and thus rate payers ultimately) are paying about 200% extra to subsidise this wind farm.
On the other hand, today (in January 2022) the market price is fluctuating closer to £200 per MWh due to gas prices and so £140 per MWh looks like a bargain.
[ The way Contracts for Difference works is you sell your electricity like everybody else, via some mix of long term and short term contracts, and the government tops up the difference between the market price and your "strike price" so that your income is always determined by your strike price not subject to changes in the market price. This also means if market prices are higher (as they often have been this past year) you pay the government back the difference so you still only get the income your strike price guaranteed. As a result the risk of not generating electricity stays with you, as does the risk of not selling your electricity for market prices but the government eats your risk that market prices are far lower than you expected while also gobbling up any windfall profits if market prices are far higher ]
Now, if Hornsea and similar wind farms don't exist, does the UK magically pay the same price £140 per MWh for that electricity even though gas is expensive and it has no other source of electricity ? Or do the prices go up even further? Maybe with no other choice the UK buys electricity for £300 per MWh or even £500 per MWh. The lights must stay on after all.
Also there are secondary effects. If you propose a new wind farm today, to start construction in 2024 and be online in 2030, you're not going to get a strike price of £140 per MWh because of course prices came down due to investment in the sector. But if there was no investment, why wouldn't you find wind farms in 2030 just as expensive as they were in 2015 ? And not only did prices come down, efficiency went up as suppliers gained experience and competed to offer better products, when Hornsea was proposed a 8MW turbine was best-in-class, Hornsea Project 2 intends up to 15MW turbines. The taller structure offers not only more peak power output, it also delivers higher capacity factor because high altitude winds are more constant.