Disadvantage: Wind turbines depend on an intermittent source of energy and occupy a lot of space. The best wind resources generally are far from big cities, requiring the construction of thousands of miles of additional high-voltage wires. Some wind turbines kill birds and bats.
Representative example: The $1 billion wind farm in Washington, Iowa, will produce a maximum 500 megawatts by 2013.
Biomass
Agricultural residues, industrial and urban wood wastes, forestry residues, and dedicated energy crops such as hybrid poplar and willow trees can be used to drive turbines and produce electricity. The biomass can be burned directly to heat water into steam or be converted into a synthetic gas before being burned.
Technology invented: The first small biomass plants, using sawdust, began generating electricity in California in 1982. Biomass plants today burn wastes such as turkey manure.
Federal research dollars since 1976: $3 billion
Carbon emitted: 0.10 metric ton per megawatt-hour
Cost per plant: $3.5 billion
Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 7.5 cents to 8.8 cents
Estimated production cost of a kilowatt-hour in 2025: 7.5 cents
Waste: Biomass plants produce mineral ash, which can be used as a fertilizer, along with some fine particulates, nitrogen oxides, and carbon dioxide.
Advantage: Biomass plants use renewable fuels and burn wastes, which eliminates the need to store them in landfills.
Disadvantage: Increased use of biomass would require more land for energy crops, e.g., hybrid poplars, willows, and switch grass, perhaps displacing food crops and wild lands.
Representative example: The $400–500 million biomass plant in Appling County, Georgia, will produce a maximum 100 megawatts by 2014.
Solar thermal
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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.
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