Friday, September 3, 2010

Do Renewables cost less than nuclear power?

US Electricity Generating Costs


Reference: This graphic comes from an excellent Energy Tribune post, "Wind Energy’s House of Cards," By Steve Goreham. I have referenced the EIA energy cost data set several times. The most recent set was released on January 1010.

4 comments:

Author said...

Is this one of the EIA projections? A citation would be very helpful.

Rick Maltese said...

Hi Charles I like your graph. I had an ambitious plan to do a useful comparison chart and the abandoned it as too hard to research. maybe you could add this as something to consider
http://thoriummsr.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/comparing-nuclear-advantages/

Thanks Rick Maltese

Robert Hargraves said...

Charles,

Please do cite the reference URL. I'll use it in my course.

Fordi said...

So, using the EIA numbers, the difference in price between the cheapest non-carbon electrical source (biomass, ostensibly) and the cheapest carbon-producing electrical source (Adv CC), about 31.7 $/MWh, including what we know about natural gas (@100%eff, produces ~49 MJ/kg), a high efficiency estimate for combined cycle (call it 50%), and the known carbon ratio for methane (1 tonne methane + 4 tonnes oxygen => 2.25 tonnes water + 2.75 tonnes carbon dioxide), we can calculate that a carbon tax would need to be a minimum of 78.45 USD / tonne CO2 in order to be properly effective in reducing emissions.

Plug it into google and play!
((111.0 - 79.3) USD / MWh) * (0.5 * 49 megajoules/kg) / (2.75) in USD / tonne

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