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How friendly turbines are effectually causing price fall? let's have a check
Fremont, CA: Non-renewable thermal power plants are being consigned to a role that maintains a balance; for the times when the solar and wind energy fail to supply. The prices have been falling for both wind and solar power, with the offshore wind taking the place of most reduced rates equally cheap as any other energy source as California, China, and parts of Europe. The product of this is the increase in the marginalization of fossil fuel plants across many markets, a trend imprinted to continue for several years to come.
The figures by BloombergNEF shows that the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) benchmark cost for offshore wind sits $78/MWh, 32% lower than last year. The latest offshore wind projects are much bigger and have much more powerful turbines that run with a capacity of 10MW. These turbines assist in increasing the savings in both capital and operational expenditures.
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Recently the International Energy Agency reported that offshore wind could be a $1 trillion industry having the capacity to generate multiple times more electricity than necessary in the US, Japan, and Europe as the costs have been continuously falling. Contrasting to this, the technology continues to improve.
In the meantime, onshore wind and PV projects are at 6 and 11 percent cheaper in wind and solar, than they were a year ago. These technologies have been facing the tests as the most economical sources of energy generation among the newer methods, when compared to coal and gas power plants. And in China, the levelized costs of the wind and solar are now at its lowest, decreasing to the value of average regulated coal price.
Cheaper wind power is a result of the reduced price of the turbines, while for the solar the key driver has been weak in China, the world’s largest solar market. Here the capital expenditure dropped by 11 percent in the last six weeks. This phenomenon like domino effect resulted in the reduced prices everywhere. In some of the cheapest solar projects that have been financed recently in markets such as India, Chile, and Australia plans are being made to achieve an LCOE of $27-$36/MWh. The sweetest onshore wind farms – in Brazil, India, Mexico and Texas – have costs of $26-$31/MWh already.
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