Renewable Energy Business Consulting and Investment Services

I urge readers to go through this excellent article explaining the costs of various means of generating electrical power.  This is a wonderful presentation of the most important ingredients in the calculus that we would like to think our leaders employ in establishing public energy policy. 

To present a few of the basics:

• The availability of renewables fluctuates during each 24-hour cycle, and thus it’s normally assumed that they are inappropriate for providing baseload power.

• The cost of building the plant is independent of the cost of the fuel to operate the plant.

• Where solar and wind can be switched on and off in seconds, fossil fuel and nuclear plants cannot.

• The cost of pollution needs to be included in the calculations.

While I don’t dispute any of this, there are important aspects of the discussion that I feel need to be brought forward:

1. The reason that we believe renewables cannnot provide baseload power is not intrinsic to the generation method per se, but to our perceived inablility to store energy inexpensively. However, molten salt technology, which stores energy as heat and coverts it to electricity on demand, is a proven method of removing this objection. I urge readers to note the work of Ausra, the US leading solar thermal company, based in Northern California. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. David Mills, the company’s founder, in preparation for my book on renewables.
2. The actual cost of building these plants is almost never anywhere near the projected budget.  Readers may want to Google “nuclear plant cost overrun,” and read a few of the 54,700 articles they’ll find on the subject. Here’s one that refers to a certain nuclear project as “satanic,” based on the the actual amount of the overrun ($6.66 billion). The Florida utility, FPL Group, now estimates the cost of building a new nuclear power plant at over $9 billion, nearly double their previous estimate.
3. The nuclear industry and its lobbies have carefully confused us about the costs and safety of shipping and storing nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for as long as one million years.
4. As noted, the author of the article above mentions the cost of the pollution, but does not suggest any real way of quantifying it. While I’ll grant that this is not a straightforward issue, it’s really crux of the matter.

As I’ve written many times in the past, if the price we pay per kilowatt-hour of electricity (or for a gallon of gasoline) included the cost of addressing the lung disease and long-term environmental damage to our skies and oceans, the math would be changed completely. Society’s desire to continue to mine, process, ship and burn coal and oil would be gone in the blink of an eye.