Efficiency pays dividends

Onshore wind is often cheaper than dead dino power. PV solar is now typically on par, so this is not surprising.

In the US, we're seeing some states now subsidizing coal and nuclear plants because natural gas, wind and solar are making them uncompetitive.

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Nuclear and coal power plants financial plans are for 40-50 years, so if they screw up predicting the future market (which many did), they suddenly have these unprofitable plants. Some examples are:

Ohio Governor Signs Coal and Nuclear Bailout at Expense of Renewable Energy | InsideClimate News

Major utility fails to get West Virginia customers to bail out its aging coal plant – ThinkProgress

Perry says federal coal and nuke bailout not dead, but encourages states to act | Utility Dive

Wyoming passes coal support bill in spate of Western action to save ailing plants | Utility Dive

Not all of these efforts are successful, but many states with large coal or nuclear plants have either passed or are considering some form of subsidy or bailout.

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ironically - as battery backup & solar become more cost-effective than non-renewables the failure to properly assess fossil fuel costs likely doesn't take into account 50 year prediction screw-ups ..... such as affects of mountains of coal ash

 

I live in Ohio. Sometime around 2009, First Energy bought these coal plants so if there was a 50 year plan it wasn't a very good one. First Energy is in bankruptcy but they had plenty of money to spread around the Capitol to convince our forward thinking representatives and governor what a great deal it would be to have the people of Ohio pay more for electric so that these 2 coal plants and 2 nuclear plants could continue to operate with customer funded subsidies.

First Energy also had the money to put ridiculous commercials on tv every 5 minutes justifying House bill 6. They claim that the Chinese were going to take over our electric grid if we didn't pass this bill.

When this bill passed, a new natural gas generating plant that they were building in Northeast Ohio was put on hold. The builders/financiers indicated that the new plant was to replace the electrical generation that was to be lost when these four plants went offline. They weren't going to try to compete with subsidized energy from those 4 plants.

Buying cheaper electricity generated by natural gas, wind and solar just made too much sense to them. They also passed some of the most stringent site restrictions in the country on any new windmills. Probably with encouragement dollars from First Energy.

I have an all electric home with a heat pump. I created an Excel spreadsheet that tracks my electrical kilowatts used and energy costs over the last 20 years. The electric rate held steady at around 3 cents/kw from the late 90's until about 2009. That is when deregulation of our electricity occurred and American Electric Power was no longer the monopoly supplier. First Energy came on the scene about that time and bought these power plants.

I was given the privilege of buying electricity on the open market from any supplier. The problem is that in about 3 years the electric rate rose from 3 cents/kw to as high as 10 cents/kw no matter which supplier you chose. As natural gas generation, wind and solar has replaced many coal plants, the cost has settled at about 6 cents/kw. Of course my local utility has added a number of creative surcharges onto the generation cost so the actual delivered cost per kw is about 12.3 cents/kw.

I have done everything I could to conserve energy and minimize our energy use. Our electric bill, which is our only energy bill is still budgeted at under $100 per month so I guess that I shouldn't complain but complaining is something that I do well.

 

Have you also converted the hot water heater to a heat pump? That is another potential large chunk of energy savings, I made that conversion in 2013.