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Stories tagged with power prices

Why wind needs feed-in tariffs (and why it is not the enemy of nuclear)

Posted by Jerome a Paris on March 4, 2008 - 12:30am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Economics/Finance
Tags: nuclear, power prices, wind [list all tags]

An argument often heard against wind is that it costs a lot in public subsidies for a solution that will always have a limited impact (because it still produces only a small fraction of overall needs, and because of its unreliability linked to its intermitten nature). This is an argument worth addressing in detail, especially when it is pointed out, as the graph shows, that wind is already almost competitive with the other main sources of electricity, which suggests that it might not even need the subsidies then (and the increase in commodity prices since that graph was prepared using 2004 data, only reinforces that argument).

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