About a month ago the American Wind Energy Association blogged: “Fact Check: New Evidence Rebuts Heartland’s Bogus RPS Claims.” I’m scratching my head a bit trying to understand their so-called facts. The big claim from AWEA:
The eleven states that produce more than seven percent of their electricity from wind energy have seen their electricity prices fall 0.37 percent over the last five years, while all other states have seen their electricity prices rise by 7.79 percent.
The blog post mentions DOE data, and the post links to a report the AWEA assembled titled “Wind Power’s Consumer Benefits” which cites U.S. EIA data on “Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers” (find the data here). The blog doesn’t explain their method and the report is only barely more helpful in that regard.
The AWEA report describes the price suppressing “merit order” effect of subsidized/low marginal cost wind energy, but that is a wholesale price phenomena that doesn’t include various other utility compliance costs, and anyway the AWEA is making claims about end consumer benefits from lower retail prices. The merit order effect only matters to consumers if consumers end up paying lower retail prices.
So I downloaded data from the EIA site and tried to calculate the retail percent change in price for every state over the last five years, then compared the eleven states that AWEA said produce more than seven percent of their electricity from wind energy to the remaining states and DC.
By my simple average, prices in the 11 “wind states” were about 18.8 percent higher in December 2013 than they were in December 2008; prices in the 39 other states and DC were about 5.7 percent higher in December 2013 than they were in December 2008. Now maybe AWEA is doing a weighted average by kwh sold or something different than my straightforward calculation, but they don’t explain it and I can’t reproduce it.
Can you?
The price data from December 2008 and December 2013 for the eleven “wind states” and “Avg-All Others” are:
| State | Dec-08 | Dec-13 | Percent change |
| Iowa | 7.10 | 7.77 | 9.4% |
| Kansas | 7.01 | 9.19 | 31.1% |
| Minnesota | 7.66 | 9.27 | 21.0% |
| North Dakota | 6.35 | 8.03 | 26.5% |
| South Dakota | 6.93 | 8.57 | 23.7% |
| Oklahoma | 6.55 | 7.14 | 9.0% |
| Texas | 10.85 | 8.77 | -19.2% |
| Colorado | 8.01 | 9.48 | 18.4% |
| Idaho | 5.97 | 7.91 | 32.5% |
| Wyoming | 5.68 | 7.71 | 35.7% |
| Oregon | 7.24 | 8.61 | 18.9% |
| Avg-All Others | 10.60 | 11.19 | 5.7% |
| * Prices are cents/kwh | |||
I can’t help but notice that only one of the 11 wind states (Texas) saw a decline in prices over the time period, and the other 10 wind states actually saw prices increase from December 2008 to December 2009 faster than the overall average of the other states.
So what kind of funky AWEA arithmetic turns (mostly) larger retail price increases in the 11 states into a big consumer benefit?
NOTE: By the way, a sophisticated attempt to address the questions of wind power’s consumer benefits-if any on net-would look at a lot more information than simple average retail rates by states. I was trying to engage the debate on the level presented and even at this simple level of analysis I can’t tell how they got their numbers.