So cheap that it is disrupting the Brazilian energy market as Cleantechnica reported : ” Wind farms have won 55% of contracts awarded by Brazil’s national energy agency (…) and wind power now costs about 4.5 cents/kWh in the country. “
This is really really cheap as generally wholesale prices in Europe are three to five times higher. Cleantechnica has a very nice article on how renewables are becoming cheaper and cheaper as the prices of fossil fuels increase.
Grid parity – ie. renewables as cheap or cheaper than coal or gas – is slowly but surely arriving all around the world as I wrote in the past few weeks here.
The tremendous advantage of both solar and wind energies is that once they are installed, there is no fuel costs. In a world where energy prices are skyrocketing and will just keep on doing so – see : Oil prices will just keep on increasing – this is perhaps the ace card renewables have to play.
This would be already a huge worry for traditional utilities if wind or solar weren’t becoming cheaper and cheaper. Back to Brazil, the prices of wind power got slashed by no less than 41 percent since 2009.
And this is only the beginning as globally, wind power will be competitive by 2016 and solar will be by 2018 at the latest. Exciting times ahead !
Image credits : Flickr.
