>As more governments raise the price of fossil fuels through increased taxation, solar and wind may cost less than fossil fuels.
well, as it stands currently the whole society pays the tax for the fossil fuels use - that tax is the expenses and damages caused by the environment damage and climate change, oil wars, backward countries and people having huge political power due to being rich from oil, etc... It is only fair to shift at least some of the tax burden to the actual producers and consumers of the fossil fuels.
>What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised?
what are you talking about? 100w solar panel costs less than $100, double that for installation and wires&converter. So $200 loan at 6% for 20 years is $1.5/month or $0.05/day. In CA the panel will produce 1kwh/day. I.e. $0.05/kwh. And no more kissing of Saudi princes' lower backs :)
For society you need reliability, you just don't stop freezers just because sun goes down, or there is period of storms or night. You would need atleast 14 times the hour capacity just to smooth the daily curve. [In winter there is less sunlight hours and maximum sun light is mid-day.]
The cost is more than 0.1$ per watt hour of capacity, just for battery, and not for any power electronics going with it.
So this alone would increase your cost estimates by 150$
And for society you probably want a weeks worth of electricity stored in some form or other to deal with weather differences, and not summer winter difference. So minimal goal would be 24*7. Or just more than 150 hours.
Or that another 1500$ of cost not included in your estimations.
Now a big thing to realize, in electricity markets where networks are required to take in solar and wind from other players, its not the producer of electricity that bears the cost of that large storage its the utility that buys the electricity from market.
Right now it works somewhere along the lines. Lets make 40% efficient fossil fuel plants instead of 60% efficient slowly starting fossil fuel plants, so that we can turn them on and off for covering the difference between intermitted sources and consumption.
So in reality renewable plants end up just becoming fuel saving devices for fossil fuel plants while reducing fuel efficiency of said plants when they actually are turned on .
In long run I believe nuclear is way to go if we want to stop global warming. The intermittency problem goes away with it and you can run a grid with 100% nuclear with very little storage because production isn't intermittent, and with modern plants you can vary electricity production between 50 and 100%
Global warming is accumulating effect, the emissions are just rate of change, and not the temperature difference, and we need to aim pretty close to zero emissions to stop it. [Yes nature takes some of it off from circulation but a lot less than people think because naysayers compare our emissions to winter, summer cycle of plants that cancels itself in yearly basis.]
it isn't a car, so the range of technological options is much wider, ie. there is no need for high capacity small batteries. One can hydrolyze the water during low loads and store the resulting hydrogen (hydrolysis equipment and stationary storage is relatively simple and cheap). A generator with gas turbine to burn the hydrogen would cost on the scale like $400/kw - a small addition to the $2K/kw capital cost for solar panels install. The week of reserve storage - 200kwh to be generated - with even low 40% efficiency of turbine generation - would require storing 250m3 of hydrogen to provide a week reserve per 1kw of basic capacity. Lets say that storage is generous $1/m3.
As result, under $3K/kw we'd have a week of reserve and the ability to short-term double power during peaks using the gas turbines. And using the same loan calculations it is $0.075/kwh.
>As more governments raise the price of fossil fuels through increased taxation, solar and wind may cost less than fossil fuels.
well, as it stands currently the whole society pays the tax for the fossil fuels use - that tax is the expenses and damages caused by the environment damage and climate change, oil wars, backward countries and people having huge political power due to being rich from oil, etc... It is only fair to shift at least some of the tax burden to the actual producers and consumers of the fossil fuels.
>What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised?
what are you talking about? 100w solar panel costs less than $100, double that for installation and wires&converter. So $200 loan at 6% for 20 years is $1.5/month or $0.05/day. In CA the panel will produce 1kwh/day. I.e. $0.05/kwh. And no more kissing of Saudi princes' lower backs :)