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.
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4 comments:

  1. AuthorSeptember 3, 2010 at 8:46 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rick MalteseSeptember 4, 2010 at 1:44 AM

    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

    ReplyDelete
  3. Robert HargravesSeptember 4, 2010 at 5:53 AM

    Charles,

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

    ReplyDelete
  4. FordiSeptember 10, 2010 at 1:52 PM

    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

    ReplyDelete