Energy Futures

A quick guide to alternative energy.

Ronald Bailey from the June 2009 issue

(Page 3 of 8)

Federal research dollars since 1976: $6.5 billion Carbon emitted: 0.38 metric ton per megawatt-hour

Cost per plant: $920 million. The Electric Power Research Institute doesn’t estimate the cost or price with carbon capture, possibly because carbon emissions are comparatively low.

Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 7.5 cents to 8.9 cents

Estimated production cost of a kilowatt-hour in 2025: 6.8 cents to 8.1 cents

Waste: Natural gas produces no ash and contains practically no sulfur or metals, so emissions of these substances are virtually zero.

Advantage: The U.S. consumes 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year. Proven reserves are 277 trillion cubic feet, and the total domestic resource is estimated at around 1,500 trillion cubic feet.

Disadvantage: The byproducts of concern from these plants are nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, although the emissions are much lower than those of coal-fired plants.

Representative example: The $405 million plant in Brookings, North Dakota, will produce a maximum 300 megawatts by 2012.

Nuclear power

In a nuclear plant, uranium and other fissile materials are used to produce nuclear chain reactions as a way to heat water into steam, which then drives power generation turbines.

Technology invented: The Shippingport atomic power station in Pennsylvania began operating in 1958 as the first commercial nuclear power plant. It was jointly operated by the Department of Energy and the Duquesne Light Company until it was decommissioned and dismantled, a process that lasted from 1982 to 1989.

Federal research dollars since 1976: $27.4 billion

Carbon emitted: none

Cost per plant: $4 billion

Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 7.5 cents

Comments

Shannon Love|11.14.09 @ 1:16PM|#

This is a good article but it overlooks the most important cost factor. It doesn't matter how much it cost to generate a watt of electricity at the generation source, it only matters what it cost to receive a kilowatt of electricity at the point of consumption.

A good example of this would the real world cost of electricity from a portable diesel generator. You could calculate how much the generator cost and the average cost of diesel but that wouldn't tell you how much a kilowatt would cost if the generator was located in the wilds of Alaska and all the diesel had to be flown in. Likewise, the cost of hydroelectric power has to include the cost of transmission from were geology dictates the dam has to be to the point of consumption.

Since weather-dependent generation cannot produce power anything close to 24/7/365, the cost per kilowatt at the point of consumption has to include all cost of increased transmission, any energy storage systems and (far more realistically) the fossil fuel and nuclear plants that will always have to be running in the background to take up the slack with less than a half hour notice.

Electricity is not a luxury and it is not something we can do without. A modern economy is basically just a system for using electricity to turn dirt into useful things. We have to have electricity when and where we need all the time. Weather-dependent generation cannot provide that and has such it remain a toy for the foreseeable future.