The California Green premium for electricity.costs.

ECOWorld.com has published some cost estimates by Ed Ring in connection with California's Proposition 7, which mandates an average renewables power of 50% of California's electricity outputs by 2025.

ECOWorld estimates the installed cost of solar power without transmission or storage infrastructure costs about $7.0 million per megawatt of rated output, or $7.0 billion per gigawatt. However on the best days California, solar output would only produce 4.5 hours per day electricity. Thus in order to produce 500 gWh of solar generated electricity each day in California, a solar array with a rated capacity of 111 gigawatts would be required. Such an array would cost $777 billion dollars.

For $777 billion would pay for 100 nuclear plants capable of producing 100 GW continuously, or 2400 gWhs a day, nearly 5 time the daily output of the solar facility.

What if California chose wind instead of solar. ECOWorld estimates a capacity factor of 17.5%, a very problematic figure a wind array equal too 119 gigawatts of wind generating name plate capacity, which would cost $297 billion dollars. Too this must be added the cost of new transmission lines. grid upgrades, and massive energy storage units. ECOWorld estimates the minimum cost for wind to be $300 billion. EcoWorld calculate the cost of energy storage to be $350 Million per gWh, and calculate that 100 gWhs of storage is needed, which would run $35 billion for a total cost of $335 Billion. The 350 million per GWh for storage is probably low but I won't argue. At any rate #335 will get you ate least 42 reactors. 42 reactors with average capacity factor of .90 will produce 900 gWhs of power every day. Since we need 500 gWhs, we only need 24 reactors and that will cost $192 billion, or 57% of the cost of a 42 reactor generating system. Thus the Green premium will run 43% of nuclear system costs for wind. The Green premium for solar would be an astonishing 300% of the cost of a nuclear system.