Cost per facility: $18 billion to $20 billion
Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 33.5 cents to 39.4 cents
Estimated production cost of a kilowatt-hour in 2025: The Electric Power Research Institute has no current estimate, although technological improvements should lower costs, perhaps considerably.
Waste: In a 2008 life-cycle analysis of various photovoltaic technologies, researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory found that “the differences in the emissions between different photovoltaic technologies are very small in comparison to the emissions from conventional energy technologies that photovoltaics could displace.”
Advantage: Silicon photovoltaic solar cells produce no air pollution, create little or no noise, and require no fuel.
Disadvantage: Solar cells supply energy intermittently and occupy a lot of land.
Representative example: In February 2009, Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans to build solar cell arrays at various locations on land it already owns, at a cost of $1.4 billion. When completed, they will all together produce 250 megawatts at their maximum capacity.
Thin-film solar photovoltaic
Like silicon crystal photovoltaic cells, this technology produces electricity directly from sunlight. Thin-film photovoltaics weigh less and cost less than crystalline silicon-based technologies. Some companies use combinations of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium to make their solar cells while others produce cadmium and telluride cells.
Technology invented: The Institute of Energy Conversion at the University of Delaware began research on thin-film photovoltaic cells in 1972.
Federal research dollars since 1976: $3.6 billion
Carbon emitted: none
Cost per facility: $10 billion to $12 billion
Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 24.6 cents to 31.5 cents
Estimated production cost of a kilowatt-hour in 2025: No estimate is available, but technological improvements should lower costs, perhaps considerably.
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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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