Report: Wind Generation Costs Twice As Much As Government Estimates

As lawmakers rush to hash out a deal to extend tax credits for wind energy generation, a new report shows that, once hidden costs are accounted for, the true cost of wind power generation is twice that of what previous government estimates have shown.

“Once these hidden costs are included and subsidies are excluded, wind generation is not close to being competitive with conventional generation sources such as natural gas, coal or nuclear,” said George Taylor, lead author of the report and senior fellow in energy policy at American Tradition Institute, in a statement.The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

For example, wind generation costs three times as much as natural gas-fired electricity and up to 50 percent more than government estimates for new nuclear and coal power generation.

The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

Most electricity cost estimates fail to take into account, the cost of keeping fossil fuel power plants online to balance out the variations in wind power generation, and the increased fuel consumption — per unit of output — which wind requires of power plants. Estimates also typically don’t include the additional long-distance transmission costs required by wind, as well as the electricity losses associated with it.

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