Wind Farms Blow up Electricity Costs in NSW

Electricity companies are being forced to include expensive and unreliable wind power in their generation mix and slug consumers for double the cost oc coal power.

"This energy is not reliable and could never provide a baseload electricity source. But the big companies are obliged to build these projects by law," Mr Freund said. "The price for wind farms is passed on to the customer - but it is done in an invisible way."An ACIL Tasman report comparing the current long-run marginal costs for power generators revealed the difference between coal and wind energy. The 2008 report showed that by this year, wind energy projects would cost the equivalent of $97.62 per megawatt hour (MWh) compared with $45.99 for black coal.

The Climate Change Department responds with bureaucratic gobbledygook for the increasing power prices using - wait for it - computer models :
 "These costs are dependent on a range of underlying assumptions and electricity market modellers typically have different views on the levelised costs of different generation technologies," he added.
Forbes Magazine has a good article on wind generation worth reading.


Unfortunately, wind doesn’t afford the benefits marketers promise. It isn’t an abundant, reliable power source; doesn’t appreciably reduce fossil dependence or CO2 emissions; isn’t free, or even cheap; doesn’t produce net job gains; nor does it cool brows of feverish environmental critics.