Denmark’s wind farms generated 140% power needs on July 9

[Simon_Jester]

Blame renewable subsidies for Hinkley Point. What kind of moron would in society where you get guaranteed profit, directly from taxpayer pocket in exchange for nothing, build expensive powerplant which would be at the mercy of changing electricity prices?

That would be stupid. Better build windmill, not give a crap about stability of grid and let taxpayer bleed when they have to make up the difference between market price and guaranteed price. And should price climb up so that you no longer sap taxpayer, just consumer, you can build plants which have lower production costs and THEN make killer profit that way.

Renewable subsidies are messing up energy markets, it is going to hurt us bad in future.

So nuclear energy isn´t flexible enough for the current system. Therefore it is silly to build it. At least in this case.

How exactly does your statement follow from Tiwaz's statement?

In a capitalist economy, you can make any otherwise profitable and sensible thing 'unprofitable' if you're willing to subsidize its competitors.

If the British government were willing to spend enough tax dollar money subsidizing electricity generated by swarms of hamsters running in wheels, then the 'profitable' option for British electricity providers would be to build hamster power plants- because those are the ones that have a government-guaranteed profit.

That wouldn't make hamster power 'efficient' and it wouldn't make non-hamster power 'too inflexible.'

So it is random without any rhythm or guaranteed pattern. Shame modern societies do not run on principle of people living at their offices waiting for wind to pick up so that computers get power so they can get their job done.

You just have a strange definition of "random". Experts agree that wind forecasts are pretty good. Solar is even better.

The difference between random and nonrandom phenomena is that you can't find a pattern which allows you to predict a random thing far, far in advance.

Wind can be forecasted a few days in advance, but it is still random. It doesn't follow a fixed pattern; you can't say "there will be a very windy day every eight days, followed by two low-wind days, followed by three days of moderate wind."

Solar power is nonrandom, at least as long as clouds aren't involved.

And then there are benefits of rich countries going for renewables that are often ignored. Poor and developing countries often can´t aford nuclear power plants but want energy. Or they don´t have a grid that is necessary for centralized power generation. It is also not desirable that unstable areas build nuclear power plants. It would be rather worrying if Syria had a couple of nuklear plants that would be conquered by ISIS or similar scum.

Therefore it is more desirable that such countries use renewable energy.

The security issue is real, but...

It's intellectually dishonest of you to claim that renewables work well as a 'decentralized' power grid. If anything they require MORE of a power grid than a coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric plant, because you have to be able to shift supplies of energy around the country, from regions that are currently not generating power to regions that are, and both kinds of regions must be connected to storage facilities.

Whereas with a coal plant, you can in fact build a coal-fired power plant that powers an isolated city that is not connected to a national grid, and simply vary the output of that one plant to satisfy the needs of that one city.

You can't do that with solar or wind power, because solar provides no electricity at night, and wind provides none on many days of the year. So during those times, power must come from some other, entirely different region.

[salm]

How exactly does your statement follow from Tiwaz's statement?

In a capitalist economy, you can make any otherwise profitable and sensible thing 'unprofitable' if you're willing to subsidize its competitors.

If the British government were willing to spend enough tax dollar money subsidizing electricity generated by swarms of hamsters running in wheels, then the 'profitable' option for British electricity providers would be to build hamster power plants- because those are the ones that have a government-guaranteed profit.

That wouldn't make hamster power 'efficient' and it wouldn't make non-hamster power 'too inflexible.'

I guess, you´re right.
However, I´d like to see how it´s the renewables fault that Hinkley Point C is as expensive as it is.
Furthermore, nuclear has been subsidized as well and so far nobody has been able to produce reliable numbers on what the real cost of nuclear energy is.

The difference between random and nonrandom phenomena is that you can't find a pattern which allows you to predict a random thing far, far in advance.

Wind can be forecasted a few days in advance, but it is still random. It doesn't follow a fixed pattern; you can't say "there will be a very windy day every eight days, followed by two low-wind days, followed by three days of moderate wind."

Solar power is nonrandom, at least as long as clouds aren't involved.

The way I understand it short therm forecasting is the most important thing. The long term wind is pretty reliable (about 340 days/year for offshore, for example.). The important part is to know how the wind will change in short term so backup energy or storage can be activated. Or in case of too much wind to know when to turn off a certain percentage of your wind farms in order to lower enregy production.

It is not random in the sense that you´ll suddently be surprised with a lack of wind making your power system collaps. And because wind is not random and actually does follow certain patterns it is possible to sucessfully forecast it. If it really was random this would not be possible.

The security issue is real, but...

It's intellectually dishonest of you to claim that renewables work well as a 'decentralized' power grid. If anything they require MORE of a power grid than a coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric plant, because you have to be able to shift supplies of energy around the country, from regions that are currently not generating power to regions that are, and both kinds of regions must be connected to storage facilities.

Whereas with a coal plant, you can in fact build a coal-fired power plant that powers an isolated city that is not connected to a national grid, and simply vary the output of that one plant to satisfy the needs of that one city.

You can't do that with solar or wind power, because solar provides no electricity at night, and wind provides none on many days of the year. So during those times, power must come from some other, entirely different region.

In countries that have large parts of their countries not connected to the grid at all the only way to supply energy is by decentralized power generation such as PV and wind. Bangladesh is often cited as an example for renewable off grid energy in poor countries. Here´s an article about it:
Link

[Simon_Jester]

The way I understand it short therm forecasting is the most important thing. The long term wind is pretty reliable (about 340 days/year for offshore, for example.). The important part is to know how the wind will change in short term so backup energy or storage can be activated. Or in case of too much wind to know when to turn off a certain percentage of your wind farms in order to lower enregy production.

It is not random in the sense that you´ll suddently be surprised with a lack of wind making your power system collaps. And because wind is not random and actually does follow certain patterns it is possible to sucessfully forecast it. If it really was random this would not be possible.

In fairness, wind truly is semi-predictable- but far less predictable than solar. And it certainly requires an extensive and organized systems of storage and power grids to make work.

In countries that have large parts of their countries not connected to the grid at all the only way to supply energy is by decentralized power generation such as PV and wind. Bangladesh is often cited as an example for renewable off grid energy in poor countries. Here´s an article about it:
Link

Ah. That's what you mean.

Yes to that in that localized solar power can be an alternative to electric generators, if you don't need a particularly stable power supply. What it cannot do is provide energy for an operation that requires it continuously, such as a city or town in the developed world. Or many kinds of industrial concerns.

Moreover, micro-scale, decentralized power is almost entirely a matter of solar energy, not wind- because organized use of wind farms requires access to a national network of large structures and weather forecasting and all the rest. Whereas anyone can (with a few tools and some training) put photovoltaics on a roof, anyone with eyes can tell when the sun is or is not shining, and anyone with a brain can predict when it'll happen to a tolerable level of accuracy.

[Terralthra]

The main problem with space solar from off-world resources is the path dependency of a switch away from fossils fuels power on Earth. By the time you have the ability to put an automated refinery/factory in space around a captured asteroid to convert it into space solar panels (let's say 50-100 years from now), you'll already be well along your way of replacing the existing infrastructure with some type of renewable/efficiency mix here on Earth. The cost advantages of the space solar power would have to be extremely compelling under those circumstances (it's the same problem commercial power has, assuming it's even possible to do).

We could do this today, with sufficient will. Like many things humanity sucks at, we have a poor understanding of cost amortization. Sooner or later, our species will go to the stars. It doesn't really matter too much when we start that process, because it's going to cost a lot of resources whenever we do. Starting now offers huge advantages compared to starting later, but the price tag of starting is scarily large.

[salm]

It can be interesting to build village sized mini grids which run on wind or even mini hydro. Or on a hybrid in combination with solar. But, yeah, at the moment solar leads in this regard and perhaps allways will.

It´s not a small number of people either. Around 1.5bn people live off the grid.

<edit>it can even be interesting in cities in developing countries where you are connected to the grid. Due to regular black outs at around 5 o clock when everybody gets home and turns on their TV you´re pretty much forced to have some sort of private energy storage anyway. The usual way I´ve seen this done is that people simply get old car or truck batteries and load them during non black out times. If you have a storage device anyway you can just as well pop a PV on your roof and load it with that.</edit>

[Simon_Jester]

Mini-hydro is in many ways a simpler setup than wind because it's controllable- you'll note I referred to hydroelectric power as something "not requiring a grid," in the sense of an interconnected national network that can transfer electrical power freely from one place to another.

[salm]

I once stayed in a hotel near, i think, Xai Xai, Mozambique which was off the grid. It consisted of a couple of huts near the beach. They were powered by a small wind mill connected to a truck battery in each hut. I worked pretty decently. Of course you couldn´t power anything large but it was ok for things like light. Since the place is on a hill towards the south (in the southern hemisphere) it doesn´t get much sun so I assume a small windmill like this can be more useful than PVs in some cases.

Here´s an image i took of the place with the windmill:

[Sky Captain]

Germany has large coal reserves so if the renewable energy project fails to work as desired then there is always a fallback option even if all nuclear plants are shut down. Since you can't actually replace coal plant with wind or solar farm of similar output because coal plant must provide backup those existing coal plants are not going to be demolished just because more solar and wind capacity is added to grid.

What probably will happen as more and more renewable capacity is added is coal and gas power plants will be used less, but still remain essential to supply power when solar and wind fails. For example a high pressure system in winter can easily cover whole Germany and more. Cold weather with low winds in winter means wind farms generate little and solar generates little during day and nothing after sunset while demand for electricity is very high. That energy must come from somewhere and unless there is some huge energy storage systems fossil fueled power plants remain essential.

I just fail to see how in such scheme there could be cheap energy because a lot more stuff is needed in a renewable energy grid than in conventional grid.
You must overbuild renewable energy generating capacity to somewhat make up for low average output, overbuild power grid to move power from areas with massive overproduction to areas with low production, build energy storage systems and still keep conventional generation capacity in case a freak weather event keeps renewable energy generators from working for prolonged time over large area.

[Guardsman Bass]

We could do this today, with sufficient will. Like many things humanity sucks at, we have a poor understanding of cost amortization. Sooner or later, our species will go to the stars. It doesn't really matter too much when we start that process, because it's going to cost a lot of resources whenever we do. Starting now offers huge advantages compared to starting later, but the price tag of starting is scarily large.

I'm not so sure it does. "Later" might involve much better robotics, computers, and AI - all of which makes the process of harvesting resources from off-world sources much more cost-effective. Right now, it would just be an extremely expensive way to get power that could be much more cheaply got here on Earth from sustainable sources.

[Tiwaz]

Apologies for delay, life has been bit busy but I think this deserves response.

So nuclear energy isn´t flexible enough for the current system. Therefore it is silly to build it. At least in this case.

Simon already covered the issue, but to explain. I blame renewable energy for Hinkley because they mess up the markets.

As Simon said, if you subsidize unprofitable production enough, it becomes profitable without risks. That means that interest in building other forms of production drops as they do not possess same guaranteed profit.

Thus, when renewable energy screws the market, nobody builds "traditional" energy, but renewables cannot cover the demand 24/7. Thus, you have to start paying subsidies to "traditional" energy to make someone willing to invest in it.

You just have a strange definition of "random". Experts agree that wind forecasts are pretty good. Solar is even better.

"Pretty good" as opposed to desired and easily changed output of "traditional" solutions to meet demand?
It cannot be relied to provide energy when required and in amount required. Storage is not solution either as it requires that you can guarantee sufficient overproduction and large enough stores to carry you through even prolonged low production period. Such as one USA has experienced recently.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article ... production

That is bloody costly.

That is not true. The Fraunhofer study I posted is concerned with these costs. And up til now of course renewables are presented without the cost of storage in the sense that it doesn´t appear on the bill. We don´t have a significant amount of storage, so of course it is not important at the moment and won´t be important another two decades or so.
Studies concerning themselves with these topics on the other hand incorporate storage and backup. They also present other costs like the necessary improvement of the electrical grid.

That is extremely true actually. Cost of wind power is cheated constantly by not taking into account how much it costs to make the production reliable 24/7 around the year. It all HAS to appear on the bill because nobody is going to provide storage free. Not to mention inevitable amount of energy lost when it has to be converted back and forth.

If you can build a good balanced system with enough storage and backup you won´t be dependent on imports. Also note that I never talked about Finish energy. In fact I don´t know anything about the Finish situation therefore it would be silly to conclude that renewables are a good solution for Finland. I´ve been talking about the German Energiewende all the time.

IF you can build. Problem is, it is virtually impossible to build while maintaining it cheap enough to keep energy affordable.
Because you must overproduce the capacity due to it rarely working at nominal output. And then build storage at equally massive quantity for times when production drops even lower than usual. And then backups for situation when you get bit longer period.

Same is true for Germany.

With nuclear energy Germany is 100% dependend. We don´t even know where that shit comes from. We buy some from France for example but since France doesn´t mine uranium themselves but buys it from places like Mali we probably feed our nukes with uranium from pretty questionable sources. But we don´t know because the German government thinks it´s important to keep it a secret.

Notice that I mentioned dependency on short shelf life material. Nuclear fuel you can buy anywhere, fuel is fuel. Your current supplier starts to get troublesome? Just make sure to always buy enough to keep buffer. Finland has 1 year of unused fuel kept in storage at all times.

Interestingly Germany is exporting more Power and for a higher price per unit than it is importing. Germany made about 2bn with excess energy exports in 2013.

At the same time being forced to collect how many billions of tax money to make the unprofitable renewables profitable?
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... ndy-costly
That source tells me it was 16 billion for 2013. Still 14 billion to make up even if you managed to squeeze 2 billion from imports. If you consider that to be good business, I recommend never starting a company.

I´ve said that a whole bunch of time in this thread now. Have you actually read it? Storage, dismanteling, R&D, Insurance for example. External costs which are often not included in the cost of nuclear energy or are so muddled up and intransparent that it is impossible to conclude how much nuclear energy is per unit.

And I have told you that you are talking bollocks. Finland has covered ALL these in the costs of energy. There is no special subsidy fund for nuclear power anywhere in our budget. Companies cover all the costs of their operations from their income, including building repository for waste.

Saying "it is muddled" and then tossing words is not good, I expect you to show me where the subsidies are. If you can't point them, you really cannot say they exist either.

Not to speak of what it would cost to turn public opinion from hating nuclear power into one supporting it. I´m not sure if that could be done at all within a relevant time frame.

And then there are benefits of rich countries going for renewables that are often ignored. Poor and developing countries often can´t aford nuclear power plants but want energy. Or they don´t have a grid that is necessary for centralized power generation. It is also not desirable that unstable areas build nuclear power plants. It would be rather worrying if Syria had a couple of nuklear plants that would be conquered by ISIS or similar scum.
Therefore it is more desirable that such countries use renewable energy. However, they don´t have the resources to research these technologies, nor the financial power to bring prices of manufacturing down. So they are dependent on rich countries to do so. Rich countries will only throw significant resources at research if they somehow profit from it. Therefore it is vital that at least a couple of rich countries invest in renewables.

No, it is not. Unprofitable is unprofitable always.
Rich countries should focus money on something that works, not just make believe research into technologies which have so massive issues ingrained to them that trying to sort them out is unlikely to ever succeed.

Say, pebble bed reactors. Those might be far better idea. And with little risks.

[salm]

Simon already covered the issue, but to explain. I blame renewable energy for Hinkley because they mess up the markets.

As Simon said, if you subsidize unprofitable production enough, it becomes profitable without risks. That means that interest in building other forms of production drops as they do not possess same guaranteed profit.

Thus, when renewable energy screws the market, nobody builds "traditional" energy, but renewables cannot cover the demand 24/7. Thus, you have to start paying subsidies to "traditional" energy to make someone willing to invest in it.

So it´s too late now. Hinkley Point C is expensive. Blaming something else won´t make it cheaper. Just like it doesn´t make sense to complain about all the sunk cost in nuclear R&D which is usually disregarded when talking about the cost of nuclear, and rightly so, because it´s a sunk cost.

"Pretty good" as opposed to desired and easily changed output of "traditional" solutions to meet demand?
It cannot be relied to provide energy when required and in amount required. Storage is not solution either as it requires that you can guarantee sufficient overproduction and large enough stores to carry you through even prolonged low production period. Such as one USA has experienced recently.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article ... production

That is bloody costly.

Well, pretty good is definately completely different from random which kind of leads me to the conclusion that you haven´t really researched the issue.

Storage is a solution in combination with back up and diversification and grid improvement. It´s not likely that ALL wind/sun/whatever is going to low on the whole continent at the same time.

That is extremely true actually. Cost of wind power is cheated constantly by not taking into account how much it costs to make the production reliable 24/7 around the year. It all HAS to appear on the bill because nobody is going to provide storage free. Not to mention inevitable amount of energy lost when it has to be converted back and forth.

It doesn´t have to be on the bill for studies that are analysing the cost of energy now because at the moment we don´t need or have storage. It would be counter productive for such studies to include storage.
Long term studies do include storage cost.
There are plenty of studies out there and just because there might be some bad ones doesn´t mean they´re all bad.
In fact I´ve allready posted studies that concern themselves with storage and back up cost.

IF you can build. Problem is, it is virtually impossible to build while maintaining it cheap enough to keep energy affordable.
Because you must overproduce the capacity due to it rarely working at nominal output. And then build storage at equally massive quantity for times when production drops even lower than usual. And then backups for situation when you get bit longer period.

Same is true for Germany.

Of course IF. Everything is an IF until you try and suceed or fail.
Lots of experts think it is possible. Overproduction, fluctuation, storage are known issues. It´s not like you are the first to raise these questions. The experts still think it is possible.

Notice that I mentioned dependency on short shelf life material. Nuclear fuel you can buy anywhere, fuel is fuel. Your current supplier starts to get troublesome? Just make sure to always buy enough to keep buffer. Finland has 1 year of unused fuel kept in storage at all times.

I see no problem with trading energy. Esspecially not within EU countries.
Should the EU crumble and fall appart to a point where trading energy becomes difficult the process is going to be slow and foreseeable enough to react to it.

At the same time being forced to collect how many billions of tax money to make the unprofitable renewables profitable?
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... ndy-costly
That source tells me it was 16 billion for 2013. Still 14 billion to make up even if you managed to squeeze 2 billion from imports. If you consider that to be good business, I recommend never starting a company.

Like mentioned many times in this thread the subsidies of renewables in Germany are transparently listed on your energy bill. The subsidies of coal, nuclear and everything else are a clusterfuck of mud.
Due to the nature of the tax the subsidies are going to get less and less with every year in the future per kwh.

Like mentioned a lot of times before all energy is subsidized so according to you all energy is bad business. I recommend reading the thread.

And I have told you that you are talking bollocks. Finland has covered ALL these in the costs of energy. There is no special subsidy fund for nuclear power anywhere in our budget. Companies cover all the costs of their operations from their income, including building repository for waste.

Saying "it is muddled" and then tossing words is not good, I expect you to show me where the subsidies are. If you can't point them, you really cannot say they exist either.

Not to speak of what it would cost to turn public opinion from hating nuclear power into one supporting it. I´m not sure if that could be done at all within a relevant time frame.

I posted studies which put the cost of nuclear very high. It´s there in plain English.
You posted someting in Finish which I can´t read. I´m willing to read it but you´d have to find a translation. I´m not going to wade through complicated issues in a google translated document.

What do you mean tossing words? If anything I tossed links to studies which contain these words. External costs are not something I personally came up with. People who analyse energy costs do this. I just read the stuff and try to form an opinion and up til now forming an opinion on the external costs of nuclear energy has shown to be difficult because even the experts can´t agree on what should be considered an external cost. If you can provide clear information I´d give you a cookie. But since this probably the 15th time I´m trying to get this information I doubt anybody here has it. Which again indicates that external cost for nuclear and anything besides renewables is intransparent.

No, it is not. Unprofitable is unprofitable always.
Rich countries should focus money on something that works, not just make believe research into technologies which have so massive issues ingrained to them that trying to sort them out is unlikely to ever succeed.

Say, pebble bed reactors. Those might be far better idea. And with little risks.

Dude, this point had nothing to do with profitable and unprofitable but with security concerns and feasability in countries with bad energy infra structure.
You´re not even addressing the issue at hand.

[Thanas]

No, it is not. Unprofitable is unprofitable always.

Well I guess you better shut down all trains and travel by horse cart then.

[Tiwaz]

No, it is not. Unprofitable is unprofitable always.

Well I guess you better shut down all trains and travel by horse cart then.

Apple, meet orange.
Trains were not unprofitable early on, their use was found convenient instead of horses in mines. And neither did they come with big limiting factor...
Wind power cannot be profitable because wind is going to be hard cap on it's production. Even theoretical windmill can only capture up to 40% of energy in wind.

There is no technology anyone can point out that could make windmills rational option in large scale. You just cannot get around the dependency on hugely varied and uncontrolled production. All "solutions" offered are just going to pile expense on top of expense, making electricity even more expensive.

And rail transportation is quite cost effective even today.

[Darth Tanner]

And rail transportation is quite cost effective even today.

Not for passenger service, that pretty much without exception requires some form of subsidy.

You just cannot get around the dependency on hugely varied and uncontrolled production.

Of course you can, gas and hydro power generation is pretty much ideal for counteracting the variances in wind output... its how most countries with large amounts of wind capacity deal with it today.

Even theoretical windmill can only capture up to 40% of energy in wind

Are you talking about capacity factor? The highest one of those I've seen is around 57.9% for a very well sighted farm but a low capacity facotr doesnt really destroy the economics of wind... thats a product of the financing and construction cost against wholesale energy costs. Wind power is obviously profitable because private companies and individuals are making money out of it!

[Simon_Jester]

And rail transportation is quite cost effective even today.

Not for passenger service, that pretty much without exception requires some form of subsidy.

I have never been clear on whether that's caused by fuel inefficiency, or by other costs of running the railroad. I was under the impression that it was the latter.

You just cannot get around the dependency on hugely varied and uncontrolled production.

Of course you can, gas and hydro power generation is pretty much ideal for counteracting the variances in wind output... its how most countries with large amounts of wind capacity deal with it today.

The hydroelectric power output potential of a country is basically fixed. You can't build more rivers, and you can't increase the altitude of the source of the river. The only real question is how much of this output you're actually tapping- and for developed nations the answer is usually "about as much of it as we can." Or as much as can be taken without screwing up riverine trade and ecology- or for that matter with screwing up those things.

And gas turbines... frankly, gas is a fossil fuel.

So transferring from nuclear power to hydroelectric is often going to be impractical in a developed nation. And transferring from nuclear to gas-fired will increase carbon emissions.

Are you talking about capacity factor? The highest one of those I've seen is around 57.9% for a very well sighted farm but a low capacity facotr doesnt really destroy the economics of wind... thats a product of the financing and construction cost against wholesale energy costs. Wind power is obviously profitable because private companies and individuals are making money out of it!

In unsubsidized energy markets? You were just arguing that passenger rail isn't profitable because it needs subsidies; I assume that this isn't true of wind power?

[Darth Tanner]

I have never been clear on whether that's caused by fuel inefficiency, or by other costs of running the railroad. I was under the impression that it was the latter.

I think the big problem and need for subsidy is that the rail service only really runs anywhere near capacity at peak time to get people to and from work, the system runs largely empty at other times and lacks the ability to vary the load capacity that much so is left paying for lots of relatively unused service. Also if commuters were left to pay the actual cost of train use it would push even more people onto the roads so subsidising them can save more money relatively in traffic and economic development... London simply wouldn’t work without trains getting people into the city for instance.

The hydroelectric power output potential of a country is basically fixed. You can't build more rivers, and you can't increase the altitude of the source of the river.

Yes agreed although most countries even with limited hydro resource could build pumped storage... although obviously that is not usually an energy source rather than a storage mechanism and usually is grossly too expensive for actual energy use rather than balancing services.

For the most part most countries do have untapped hydro/tidal they could be using but its usually due to environmental concerns as you say that they are prevented from doing so... the Severn Barrage being the greatest missed opportunity for instance but would likely be a disaster for Bristol as a port and the bird life that use the estuary.

And gas turbines... frankly, gas is a fossil fuel.

Agreed but the addition of more and more intermittent generation mandates the presence of either gas, coal or diesel for balancing depending on the renewable sources utilisation hours required. Obviously it would be great to go nuclear but it simply isn’t happening and from attempts like Hinkley will be grossly unpopular/costly. AP1000 should hopefully resolve that though, in demand systems like the UK you would likely still need gas to provide the peak even with a nuclear dominated system as it would be uneconomic to run nuclear for that relatively small time scale of demand.

In unsubsidized energy markets?

You can make money from unsubsidised wind, it simply returns at a much lower rate. The purpose of the subsidy is to attract private capital to high returns to grow low carbon generation, without subsidy you would have massively less investment but you would still have positive economic returns from wind at least. Solar I think doesn’t achieve that at the moment at least without domestic import offsetting.

[salm]

Trains are similarily subsidized as cars. The whole infra structure of cars - roads, parking spaces, lighting and so on - is one enormous subsidy.