PV Gap

Jessie Said:

At what oil price level (s) will 1. wind power, 2. solar panels be competitive with oil?

We Answered:

It is very difficult to say. You have to know that it depends what costs you add and what costs you skip. For Oil the calculation is a simple one: How much for extraction, how much for transport, how is the market. The cost that is not included is the damage it is causing to the environment. As this cost is almost impossible to measure, they put it = 0 .
At the time several Oil Companies are getting tax brakes and subventions for searching for new reserves. This is also a cost to the tax payer that you don't realize when buying gasoline.
As for numbers only, if you take that one kilogram gasoline equals 13.0KWh, and you calculate that you can really use a 70% of this energy, the result is that by 3.6 dollars the gallon, the price of the energy from gasoline will be the same as from an expensive electric energy source.
As I told you, it is difficult to calculate, as real costs are seldom calculated. I don't know how much subvention wind energy or solar energy gets, comparing to nuclear or oil.