Is wind power financially viable without subsidies?

I won't address the cost, but an important point to remember is for many countries energy security is national security, food security is national security.

It is important for them that they can't be held hostage to fossil fuel supplies.

It's been a big issue for western european countries during the ukraine war.

It is in the North Sea. Since 2020, the subsidies for North Sea wind power have been negative.

The North Sea is ideal for wind power -- steady winds and high electricity prices. Other places may vary.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the-era-of-negative-s...

I'd also love to see some high quality, well researched information on this.

For instance I recently saw this exchange: https://x.com/i/bookmarks?post_id=1881090543956222293

I'm generally a proponent of renewables, but I think it's also important to take seriously quantitative arguments against them. But without good sources, it's impossible to work out who's right.

This is useful to suggest solar will win in the end: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy?...

But much less clear how well wind, especially offshore, can compete.

This is also decent but doesn't get much into cost: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind...

What is financially viable independent of politics? What doesn't have subsidies? Did the petroleum industry pay for the millions that were lead poisoned? Do they pay for the environmental damage caused by climate change? Those are also subsidies.

Check for LCOE, there's a lot of research on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

What led me to try and find out more was this unsupported comment from Francois Chollet (who seems like a smart guy):

"Also -- solar has certainly a big role to play, but wind power is largely a scam. No one should be building wind turbines. " https://x.com/fchollet/status/1881059960928543117

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

Can you elaborate on your question?

Do you mean:

* are there scenarios where a new wind power installation would be profitable without subsidies today?

* are there examples of window power installations becoming profitable without subsidies already?

* are there examples of existing wind power installations demonstrating a positive ROI against subsidies that were committed?

* hypothetically, how would wind power, as an abstract industry, compare against alternatives if subsidies had never been never committed?

* hypothetically, would wind power installations that are now viable without direct subsidies have been possible without industry subsidies in the past?

etc

These all have different answers/analyses and your question is ambiguous across them. And that's probably why you're not finding the answers you want. Not because those answers are not available, but just because your question is too vague to have one conclusive answer in the first place.

It depends on what you use to buffer / store it, really. But generally its price per MWh is dropping as turbines get bigger, so short of any specifics in the question around the part of the mix it forms, a "yes" would seem to apply.

I think it depends on many things. Also ideology can play a heavy hand -- just imagine how the costs may fluctuate if country A decides to ban import of cheap wind power stuffs from country B.

I wonder how would do you separate non/ideological material on the topic?

Ideology can (and pretty often is) implicitly embedded in our reasoning and the way we sort facts even when we are not aware of it.

To truly answer this you'd need a free market in energy, which amongst other things would also require answering the question of "is fossil fuel power viable without subsidies", which in turn would require halting the current allowed externalities the industry is built on as well as all sorts of other explicit and implicit subsidies (such as costs associated with military power to secure/protects supplies). To achieve good valuation/resource allocation/price discovery, in a market goods need to have all their associated costs built into the price. Since fossil fuels are allowed to dump pollution into the atmosphere and socialize the cost of that, there's no level playing field. Though we can observe that building in such a cost would be super easy, just regulate that all carbon emissions be net zero buy requiring a ton of CO2 be extracted from the atmosphere for every ton of CO2-equivalent emission. It's telling that the industry has been rabidly opposed.

While letting the market work would be the most efficient approach, as a political matter it's proven near impossible to just jump straight into eliminating all subsidies, so we're left with more awkward dueling sets of them. But frankly the amount of subsidization of fossil fuels since the start of the industrial revolution has been so mind blowingly expansive that it's pretty hard to take seriously any whining at all about trying to vaguely kinda even things out with regards to low pollution energy sources. All this putting aside decentralization/redundancy, national security objectives and so on.

Fun fact - heavy industry cannot run on renewable energy nor is it reliable in the winter months when more energy is needed.

Ever heard of Dunkelflaute?

Where it is windy, yes.

Just as windmills were.

Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation being spread about wind power. Sweden's last wind power subsidies were scrapped over then years ago but producers are still investing heavily in wind power. The limiting factor is Sweden's anti-woke, Trump light, "culture-warring" government. Because the environmentalists like wind power they hate it. Consequently, they have successfully stopped lots of privately funded wind power investments. Which is a shame since Sweden has some of the best wind resources in Europe.

Btw, Lazard's LCOE reports are a great source for cost on power generation for various types of power: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...