A common concern with renewable energy, is how quickly can we build out capacity. It’s not uncommon to hear advocates of coal say it’s the only option in the short term, for example.
But is this concern even valid? Sure, there is only so much equipment and trained workers to build wind and solar capacity, but if it’s obvious the number of opportunities that will exist, workers will respond pretty quick.
And those issues are heavily outweighed by wind and solar’s advantage in raw construction time. The average coal plant takes 3 to 4 years to build. A whole wind farm go up in under 3 months. Solar panels can be installed on roofs or in massive arrays as or more quickly.
It’s rather telling to examine the EIA’s report on planned capacity additions from 2007 to 2011. Post 2008, and even in 2007, renewable plans are nearly non-existent, while coal plans skyrocket. At first you may wonder what those planners are thinking, but the reason isn’t hard to find. The lack is because the short duration of wind/solar build times means the motivation to plan 5 years out doesn’t exist. For coal plants it’s a necessity.
Another telling detail in this data comes from the breakdown of energy capacity by source and producer types. As you can see, IPP, or Independent Power Producers own and have built the majority of renewable power. Utilities are tiny, trailing behind even dedicated industrial generators. As of 2006, of the 24gw of renewable capacity, 16gw is owned by IPP’s, and 5gw by industrial compared to the utilities paltry 2gw.
Why aren’t the big utilities participating? They’re bureaucracies and much prefer managing big massive projects that take years to plan and complete then to manage hundreds of small, quick and agile projects.
All this means that wind and solar are not just the smart long term solutions, their smarter short term solutions as well. They are more reactive, they encourage more efficient competition, and because they aren’t in development and planning for 4 years, they don’t have 4 years worth of accumulated interest to payoff before they ever go online.
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