I will be interested to see an unbiased analysis of this report. Wind and solar require 100% backup, meaning that computing their capital costs has to include the cost of backup generation and/or energy storage, both of which are very expensive both in capital and additional resources.

I find the following sentence from the above non-credible:

For 1.3 billion people worldwide without electricity, renewables are the cheapest source of energy. Renewables also offer massive gains in cost and security for islands and other isolated areas reliant on diesel, according to the report.

Unfortunately, the developing world is on a coal-plant building spree, because it is currently the cheapest way to electrification. Installing wind/solar means you have to build the coal plant as well, for the periods when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

Nick Lyons:
The number of proposed coal plants is declining in the U.S. except around the coal regions as you would expect. However, even a number of those are proposed coal to liquids plants; but, still coal polluters nevertheless.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Proposed_coal_plants_in_the_United_States

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5422

Always thought Oklahoma and west Texas had lots of wind, no idea that most of the wind capacity lies much farther was than I thought. Blew my mind that that region wasn't in the mix. I know Illinois has a lot of installed capacity because of Clair's nephew and many others like him had tons of subsidies but I never imagined it accounted for that much generation. Never really saw them spinning much.

And to be fair Ai vin, geography, population density, and location has plenty to do with how much reserve capacity they have on hand, I'm fairly certain most of MO's power plants are not in MISMO's area from looking at the map. Other things like being in the middle of the country, connected to several other grid systems has a lot to do with stability as well.

I'm going to stare at that map a bit, its just mind boggling to me. Apparently I live in that power corridor. Never would have thought of it as a wind region.

Nick, it's possible that when the report references "For 1.3 billion people worldwide without electricity renewables are the cheapest source of energy" they are referencing tiny household systems like Schneider's Solar powered LED lamp, which comes with battery. It can charge small devices like phones as well as light a small house.

If you are living off the grid, this probably is the cheapest way to get electricity.

It's not a lot of power, but with LEDs and cell phones, you don't need a lot.

For more info about the lamp, Google "charge the world, change the world".

There are other systems out there, Schneider's is the only one I've used personally. It works remarkably well.

Contrary to CPPS, NGPPs and NPPS' REs can be very small and own by end users or smaller groups of users.

For a single user, the storage unit (for essential e-energy) does not have to be so large nor very expensive. Ele Electrified vehicles will eventually supply part of the storage required.

However, large power grids with thoses ugly poles will be around for a long time unless we decide to bury power and communication cables.

'International' Renewable Energy Agency? With powers from whom?
There are only two alternate energy sources worth exploring - H2 and Fusion. Solar and wind take up too much territory, unless you want solar collectors on the moon. A simple extraction technique from water cannot be that far off. Solar would be OK if it was limited to the surface area of buildings, but these huge arrays out in the desert are a disasterfor many reasons. Wind turbines have so many disadvantages that it is even unnecessary to elaborate. You know them. Geothermal is interesting, but I hear little about it these days. It does a pretty good job in Iceland, why not in Hawaii?

As long as H2 enters my stack, which then carries energy to my electric motor, I think that will work out just fine, don't you?

Toshiba claims that their h2/FC scalable storage system cost less than pumped and half as much as battery based storage system. secondly, the efficiency is as good at 80% and it can store energy for much longer periods of time without lost.

Such systems could be easily used to transform intermittent energy sources like wind and solar into 27/7 clean power sources to replace CPPs, NGPPs and NPPs in Japan and other countries.

Solar and wind take up too much territory, unless you want solar collectors on the moon.

In a wind farm the turbines themselves take up less than 1% of the land area. Existing activities like farming and tourism can take place around them and animals like cows and sheep are not disturbed. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has calculated that with current tech a PV plant capable of powering 1,000 homes needs 32 acres. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are around 115 million occupied and fully used homes in the country. If we just scale up linearly (which is not, of course, how this would actually work), that means 3.68 million acres to power all of them. That's equivalent to 5,750 square miles, or around 0.1 percent of all the land the US has to offer.

Land use in America:
Department of Defense installations - 13 million acres
rural roads - 22 million acres
lawns - 31 million acres

According to US Census data, the rooftops of the United States alone offer over 200 billion square feet (4.6 million acres) of potential surface area for the installation of PV systems. Assuming only 25% of this area is suitable for unobstructed and continuous PV operation, the total energy‐generating potential exceeds 50,000 megawatts, or the equivalent of over 10 Grand Coulee Dams.

Indeed.

But my main point of that last post was that anybody worried about how much "territory" solar and wind takes up needs to put the amount into context.

We already use far more land for other purposes and if we're smart we could use some of that for RE without conflict with current uses. Wind turbines can be placed in farmers fields and pastures and the military is already putting solar arrays on their extra land.

Solar panels keep the weather out as well as asphalt shingles; http://www.dowpowerhouse.com/ but that is a relatively unimaginative combined use: You've heard of putting solar arrays over parking lots to generate energy while keeping the cars from over heating in the sun? Well howabout turning our roads into solar collectors? http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml Or putting floating solar arrays in the lakes behind our dams? That could cut down on water loss through evaporation.

ai_vin writes:

PJM, in charge of most of the grid from New Jersey to Illinois, currently holds 3,350 MW of expensive, fast-acting contingency reserves 24/7 to ensure that it can keep the lights on in case a large fossil or nuclear power plant unexpectedly breaks down.

That's compared to how much average and peak generation?

Wind is often totally off-line over large areas (BPA had a near-complete outage in early 2014 lasting almost 2 weeks, and BPA's wind appears to take week-long vacations with regularity).  PV is off-line all night every night.  These "resources" require 100% backup from other generators, and can only be counted upon to save fuel.

In actuality the wind is always blowing - somewhere.

Which is useful IF and ONLY IF "somewhere" is generating enough for themselves, enough extra for you, and there are enough transmission lines in between.  If that's not the case then that little sound-bite is a half-truth (and a half-truth is a whole lie).

Concentrated solar power (CSP) can store energy as heat in molten salts to be able to operate 24/7.

The vast majority of the USA, including the heavily-populated coasts, is too cloudy for CSP.  Power that arrives over thousands of miles of transmission lines is anything but "local and distributed".