wind turbine advantages and disadvantages
Can you please help me on a question of economics?
Which of the following power sources are most likely to come from natural monopolies? Which could be st up as either as centralized power sources or as decentralized, soft-path sources? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each typo of setup?
a. wind turbines
b.hydroelectric power generation along a river
c. coal
d. oil
e.solar
f.nuclear
Anything that can benefit a lot from economies of scale is more likely to be a natural monopoly.
Coal and Oil are finite resources where scale can allow you to buy at a discount.
Similarly, to build a nuclear plant, you kind of need huge capital investments.
So for coal, oil and nuclear, natural monopolies are obvious.
Hydroelectric is renewable, as opposed to coal or oil. However it is often not along a river actually, it’s either at a huge waterfall or from a dam; this also requires quite large investments, and once a river is dammed once, it is not easy to dam it downstream. One hydroelectric station per river at most I’d say.
Wind and solar energy is relatively free. In fact even today people are generating their own electricity using wind or especially solar energy and some are even re-selling surplus producion back to the grid.
To sum up:
oil and coal are non renewable and we will run out soon.
Nuclear is clean, but requires sizeable investment.
Hydroelectric is renewable but is limited in the sense that you can only have 1 plant per big river.
Solar and Wind are very clean, renewable and most amenable to decentralised production. They even allow individuals to sell power back to the grid. The main disadvantage of these set-ups is that not everywhere is snny or windy enough, so some people will still have to rely on centralised power sources.
Benefits Of Solar Paneling
