I was discussing this with a friend, and we conclude that for individuals not nurtured in finance, it is difficult to find information on how and where put money in safe and sort-of ethical investments.

We were thinking also in small business investment, after having a bio-farm nearby our place tht collected money from individuals to settle.

So they are admitting that running not-for-profit is a superior business model for getting things done as oppose as to extract money out of the enterprise...

The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter

You're not paying for the water - the water is, absent effective taxation schemes, essentially free. What you're paying for is the capacity - that is, you're paying for the ability to get water whenever you want it. So when actual usage drops, the per-cubic meter price goes up.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

this conflates many issues and the 'cheapness' is misleading in my opinion. some comments, in no particular order:

1. how much of the '5 billion euros saved' was actually a transfer from govt (via guarantees?)

the 5 billion is the difference between prices actually paid by buyers of electricity and what they would have paid if there had been no wind in the system (for each time period, you take out wind production out of the dispatch curve, see what the price would have been, and multiply by demand at that time).

Given that feed-in tariffs are paid for by consumers, it is the exact same pool of money so the comparison is valid

2. Wind is a stochastic source. At some times it overproduces, at some times under.  If you imagine a demand curve for electricity and superimpose wind generation on the top of it, it will look like a series of sine curves winding above and below demand. The area above demand (surplus power) has to be subtracted from nominal EROI as this energy is proformad but never realized. The area below the curve has to be subsidized by a fossil stock and aggregate energy gain in the total system declines.  If you take the nominal EROI of 19 these 2 factors cut EROI of wind roughly in half (9-10 still good however).

The "above the curve" point is true only if wind provides more than 100% of demand at any time. This is a largely theoretical issue in all systems today (Denmark has touched that threshold on a few occasions - typically at 5am on winter nights). It may become an issue as penetration increases; we'll have to see then how much of production has to be curtailed in practice, and this will indeed reduce EROEI

I fundamentally reject the notion that the area below the curve has to be "subsidized." Wind production is largely predictable within system requirements (ie day ahead and an hour ahead) - as much as demand, and the systems as they are today are perfectly able to cope with the variability of wind at no additional cost. That systems would be less able to cope in the future is something that the opponent of wind have to prove, not to claim. Experience (such as the case last winter went wind went from 50% to 0% in a few hours in Spain because winds were strong and went above the cut-off speed of turbines, and the system coped without a hitch) is on the side of wind proponents.

3. During times of low demand, flow based sources with guarantees will outprice other steady sources (coal, nuclear, run-of-river hydro)... and damage the willingness to invest there. This is not necessarily a good thing. But I agree with Jerome that the sunk cost of fossil fuel plants will cause utilities (during those situations of excess power) to complain about lack of profits.

There's two things here: profits from existing assets, and expected profits from future assets. The utilities today are unhappy with the loss of revenue on existing assets.
As to investing in new assets, there is a bigger problem than wind: it is market deregulation. If you look at what has been built in Western Europe and the US in the past 15 years, it is EXCLUSIVELY gas-fired power, ie something which is actually quite good at dealing with wind power (even baseload CCGTs can sell spinning capacity). No coal or nuke plants have been built, because there are oher, bigger, obstacles to do so. If they get to be built, it'll be through market-distorting rules or outright subsidies. That may be a good thing, but it kind of negates the argument against wind.

Gas-fired plants get built because they are market-makers, not price-takers, and thus so much less risky as investments (and they offer traders so much more opportunity to make profits)

4. from the article: "Electricity-network managers have even ordered windmills offline at times to trim supplies. "  This is a serious cost that comes with stochastic systems that pair up with fixed demand that I am just beginning to understand. If the energy generated from wind went directly to work (grinding mill or pumping water from ground etc) then it would be different story, as during times of no wind the users could just go and do something else. However wind generates electricity, which in our system if we have either 1% too much or 1% too little, can damage or even take down the grid that holds it.

Wind is very easy to cut off. Vestas is now even selling reserve capacity as one of the argument of its new V112 (ie, they offer to produce less than maximum capacity at times of wind, with the option to ramp up or down; the ramp up speed, in MW/minute, is better than for gas peakers). So the argument here is one of cost and EROAI, not of grid stability. Note that additionally; wind turbines, being scattered around the grid actually strnegthen its stability with the ability to provide voltage stabilisation and reactive power.

5. A new analysis from some of charlie hall's students (and Hannes Kunz) for East and West Denmark shows that in aggregate, the entire country of Denmarks wind farms in their lowest 20% of generation days of the year  produce 1% of the annual total in electricity - meaning that for those 2.5 months of year, full fossil back up is required.  How many places in world (other than special situations like islands like Aruba)  are building wind right now WITHOUT subsidies?  I don't know of any. The problem is that in NEW areas without existing nat gas/hydro/nuclear back up, its cheaper to just build gas over baseline than to build wind WITH gas and baseline. Please show me any area(s) that this is not the case  (areas building just wind and not needing fossil back up).

Did you not read the article? Germany, Spain and Denmark end up with cheaper electricity with wind than without, including the price of the support mechanism.

Your argument is like saying that city traffic is slower because of red lights and having to stop there. Sure, you stop, but you gain because traffic is more orderly at intersections. But people keep on saying "it has to be slower, you stop at red lights!" Imagine feed-in tariffs as redlights, ie rules that allow for more sensible behavior by all.

As to your point that wind needs backup: again: so what? The MWs are already here today; you don't need to mothball gas-fired plants when you build wind; you just use them differently, as peakers instead of base or midload providers. And again, gas capacity (MW) is cheap; it's the MWh that are expensive. Building a MW of gas-fired power plant for each MW of wind (a silly proposal, because you can cope with much less than that, even at high wind penetrations) would only increase the cost of wind by roughly 30%.

I have been a wind advocate for sometime, but I have based my favorable opinion primarily because the EROI is very high and in the end we MUST live more in balance with solar flows. However, research finishing up my dissertation on risk and timing has caused me to understand that nominal EROI is (way) overrated as an indicator.   Im sure that just like ethanol, wind makes sense to individuals and certain regions, but when looking at an aggregate energy gain for society, the costs of intermittency (not to mention discounting) are going to be too high to afford. Now, if we reduce consumption by 50-80% and change our system away from 'on demand', then wind paired with nat gas, from an energy perspective will make a lot of sense.

No, the cost of intermittency is low. I don't know where you get it from that it's going to be high. Again, the worst case cost scenario (backing up each MW of wind by a MW of gas) only means a 30% increase on the cost of wind.

@Jerome - my thoughts above are based on science. E.g. I don't 'want' to be 'for' or 'against' wind - the facts, at this juncture, tell me the stochastic nature of renewables vis a vis on demand stocks change the game more than I thought (or rather, not enough).  The elephant in the room isn't EROI, its that the human electricity system is 'on demand'.

Yes, and wind is just as predictable than demand, which means that we already know how to cope with it.

Wind power

it is difficult to compare subsidized production (via govt transfers) versus at the margin 'cheapness'. its not apples and apples.

Actually, in most European countries, there are no government transfers - the cost of the fixed price (being the difference between market prices and the fixed price guaranteed to renewable energy producers) is spread over ratepayers' bills and not supported by government funds in any way. So the fact that wind injected in the system has an effect on what the same ratepayers have to pay is directly relevant.

A more specific argument against this is that at some point, there will be so much wind in the system that prices will be too low for any technology to be profitable - and all producers (other that tariff-supported wind producers) would go bankrupt. At that point, something will need to be changed: either a minimum price for electricity for all producers, or some other form of production planification...

What you're really inferring is that nuclear and coal plants get less $ for their nighttime production of electricity than before wind. But in reality, for each kWh not produced from coal, 10-12 cents are paid to wind operators - this is guaranteed in most places.

Actually, nighttime prices are not really touched by wind - they are already low. Wind has the biggest impact at times of high demand, when the price is set by more expensive marginal producers like peakers. It is at peak times that nukes and coal make the most money, as they sell at high marginal prices electricity which costs the no more than at night. At peak times, you replace 15c/kWh peaking gas kWh by low-marginal cost wind. You don't replace the base load producers (they are cheaper), you reduce the marginal plants. When wind penetration gets high enough, it will reduce demand from baseload plants, but not the price at that time (unless some of the more expensive baseload plants are completely taken out of the supply side at that point).

So consumers are forced to buy 8c/kWh at night, but they also have to pay only 10c/kWh at peak times, instead of 15c/kWh, at the more expensive peaker plant is no longer needed and prices are set by the next most expensive plant (or the next, or the next, depending on how much wind you insert).

The difficulty is that market prices are set by marginal cost, and not by levelised average cost, and the different technologies have such different rankings when you use different cost concepts. Maybe to take wind out of the equation, you should just think about nues versus gas, because the problem is the same: the more nukes you have in the system, the lower prices are for everybody, and they end up being too low for ANY technology to be profitable (thus investment in nukes would not, and will not, happen under market mechanisms).

7. As long as no new capacity needs to be built, the higher costs of wind don't become apparent, and as you point out - for a few years this might be the case (though if you look at areas with large wind (Denmark) there was large scaling of NG plants as well) while other things were mothballed (coal)

Well, yes. Wind does not eliminate the need to invest in replacement capacity. But investment in that capacity will be needed only when existing capacity needs to be taken out (which is a big carve out); and it needs to be priced as capacity and not as MWh generation source.

If energy prices triple, then the 'duration' of wind would make it much more attractive than for a life cycle energy option like nat gas that needs a large % of costs year to year instead of up front. However this culture will crumble well before energy triples.  Personally I think we've seen the all time highs in energy prices due to money/credit overshoot. But I digress...

Investment in wind does not require high prices, it requires prices systematically higher than a given (moderately high) threshold for a very long time. A short period of low prices is enough to make a wind project go bankrupt and thus for investors not to make the initial investment decision, even if the average price is competitive. Remember my image about the guy standing on the beach, with his feet stuck to the ground, and the kid with a buoy. Whe nthe tide comes, the guy dies, and not the kid, even if on average the kid is lower than the man. "Cheap" and "competitive" are not the same thing in a marginalist market setting.

Finally, IF externalities are included (mainly carbon, but other fossil related negatives) then wind may truly be cheaper (but again, unaffordable to the current system of claims/wealth)

Externalities don't exist. Otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Just think about this: ALL generation sources (coal, nukes, wind) rae cheaper than gas-fired power plants. And yet the market, over the past 15 years, has built NOTHING BUT gas-fired plants in North America and Europe. Please think about this.

Wind power