January 16, 2018

Renewable Energy Is Kicking Ass in Colorado

I’ve got nothing but charts for you today. Sorry about that. But I might as well get them out of my system. Here’s one that Dave Roberts is excited about. It shows the average bid response to a request for new power plants from Colorado’s biggest electricity supplier:

NOTE: I’ve deleted a couple of paragraphs here. See below for explanation.

Roberts points out that the cost of storage is now surprisingly low. For wind plants it adds about $3/MWh to the cost, and for solar it adds about $6. Since storage is necessary for renewables to become reliable baseload generators that can supply electricity 24/7, this is important.

Roberts also points to the sheer scale here. Xcel received 430 bids compared to 55 for a similar request a few years ago. Of those, 350 were for renewable energy, representing over 100 GW of capacity. There are lots of companies working feverishly in the renewable energy sector.

Read the whole thing. One of the things that Roberts is excited about is that these are actual, concrete bids, and they’re considerably less than anyone was projecting a year ago. In the real world, the price of renewable energy is dropping faster than even the most optimistic projections.

UPDATE: Are you ready for a correction? Here we go.

In the Xcel report, the cost of renewables is given in MWh, while the cost of fossil plants is given in kW-mo. In order to compare apples to apples, I converted kilowatts to megawatts (divide by 1000) and months to hours (multiply by 720). That’s technically correct as a matter of units, but after some conversation on this topic I’ve finally figured out why that doesn’t work.

It has nothing to do with the arithmetic. The difference is that the cost figure for renewable plants tells you how much the bidder will charge to deliver a certain amount of electricity. For fossil plants, it’s the amount the bidder will charge to build a certain amount of capacity. The cost to actually deliver one MWh of power isn’t provided. For that reason, the cost of renewable and fossil plants really can’t be compared until Xcel provides more information.

I’ve removed a couple of paragraphs that said renewables were still more expensive than fossil plants (that’s not clear yet) and I also modified the chart to remove the cost estimates for fossil plants.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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