If a country wanted to get 1000 megawatts of electricity how much would it cost to build plants that could provide this using various forms of electricity production.
Assume you were looking into getting 1000 megawatts from hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, natural gas, geothermal, wind, solar and whatever other sources of power there are. What would it cost to build 1000 megawatt plants using each of these sources?
This site quotes $400 million for a new, natural gas 1000 megawatt plant.
AFAIK, there have been no 1000MW solar or wind plants built anywhere in the world.
The US onshore cost for wind of much smaller size, based upon the news stories of
specific plants recently, have been in the 1.2-1.5 million per MW range. There was a request recently in England to build a 1,000 off-shore farm and the news stories said the estimated cost could be about 2.5 billion.
Solar PV costs might be 5-10 billion. 1,000MW of PV was nearly the entire annual production capacity of the world’s PV manufacturers last year.
http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-03-15/milkowski-smartwind
That turbine cost $1.8 million and produces 1.65 Megawatts, which is 1.1 Billion total. That is not a bad price really, and it’d probably be cheaper if you mass produced them.
The up front construction costs are important, but I’d also like to see a comparison of what it would take to keep the plant running for 50 years. I suspect you’ll find that nuke plants are the most expensive up front, but the cheapest in the long term. Wind power has a huge up front cost but zero fuel costs (but you have to figure in some maintenance costs). PV has a huge up front cost, zero fuel cost, but then the PV panels have to be replaced every few decades which gets very expensive in the long term.
I figured that too. A coal plant will have to spend alot on raw materials to generate electricty while a wind plant or solar plant spends nothing.
I don’t know about anything else, but in the case of solar power, this isn’t a very good example to use for comparing price, IMO. Solar power is unsuited for a conventional centralized, plug-in power grid (which is the energy delivery system used throughout the developed world). This arrangement is great for the energy companies, and pretty good for the consumer too, who would find it very inefficient to buy and burn their own coal or natural gas.
Solar power is good enough right NOW to provide for most domestic electricity needs, if consumers practice methods to reduce wasted energy, but a solar-powered USA would rely upon a combination of solar plants and solar panels and batteries installed on every individual household. This is GREAT for the consumer, not so great for the energy companies. Let’s face it, after the upfront cost of the solar panels, the energy companies will not be able to make as much money selling solar energy to a public that is generating a very significant portion of their electricity independently. So, in spite of this being the ideal application of solar power for domestic use, there will be (and is) considerable resistance to this model from energy companies. That doesn’t make these companies evil or anything, since corporations are supposed to make money, after all, but it does pose a significant obstacle to the advancement of solar technology and infrastructure. And in spite of the fact that solar power is good enough right NOW, there are serious obstacles to its widespread adoption right NOW:
1: Cost prohibitiveness. Those solar panels on your house may pay for themselves over 10-20 years, but the extremely high upfront cost ($10,000?) of equipping a dwelling with solar panels and batteries is enough to turn most people off.
2: Manufacturing photovoltaic cells is expensive and “dirty.” While I believe that the benefits outweigh the negatives, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the technology.
3: Lack of public interest. Solar energy has been effectively dismissed by energy interests (and who can blame them? It is a genuine financial threat) as inefficient and expensive. The conventional wisdom on solar energy is that it is a novelty, rather than a “real” source of energy. As a result, architects seldom bother designing solar panels and energy storage into new houses, despite the relatively small portion of the price tag it would represent on most new homes.
Eh, I hope that wasn’t too much of a hijack. This is actually a really interesting topic. I’m unclear on a lot of these numbers, so when I’ve had some sleep, I’ll try to remember to do some research on things like the average power output per sq. meter/foot of a photovoltaic panel, average annual domestic electricity use in the US etc, average cost of PV panels, that sort of stuff. The Straight Dope: “Cite or Die!”
Are you sure about nuke plants being cheapest in the long term? Uranium and plutonium have to be mined, after all, which is a pretty energy-intensive operation. Even with the high cost of turbines and PV panels, I find it hard to believe that the cost of digging up nuclear fuel (or separating hydrogen for fusion) is low enough to offset the fact that wind and solar energy are limitless and, uh, free for the taking.
You’d assume with a 20 year loan you’d end up paying about the same each month for a wind or solar generator that you’d be paying for grid electricity though.
The operating cost of nuclear reactors right now is about 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Wind power at best cost about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Nuclear reactors also return about 40-60 times as much energy as is needed to create/run them, which is better than any renewable source, with the exception of hydro power.
The link doesn’t really say, but 1.65Mw is likely to be its peak, not average, output. If you built 1000Mw of capacity this way, there would unfortunately be times (low wind) when the actual output was near zero.
Solar power has the same drawback. Some sort of energy storage (pumped hydro?) is needed to cover times when the wind isn’t bowing/sun isn’t shining. That storage would add significantly to the cost.
There would be times at both low and high wind when the output was actually zero. Wind turbines will only generate within a certain range of wind-speeds.
The load factor of a given installed wind turbine depends not only on the mean wind speed, but also the variability of the wind speed (the less variable, the better). Load factor varies from up to 40% in NW Ireland and parts of New Zealand, to values in the low 20% range in the Baltic region.
So you could expect your 1.65 MW wind turbine to produce around 640 kW on average, given a good location. This seriously increases your price per effective megawatt installed.
Capital costs of coal plants vary a bit, depending most upon the emissions control technology mandated legislatively and the coal quality they are designed for. The new 1500MW Thoroughbred coal plant is going to cost close to $2.5B, and it’s pretty much state of the art in terms of emissions control technology. Typical figures in the US for new coal power plants over 500MW capacity run about $800-1200 per kW. I’m uncertain what that rate is in other countries.
Resources for the Future, in their article “Nuclear Energy: Clean, Costly and Controversial”, stated:
I find this quote more interesting though:
The idea that nuclear power is cheap is a myth. Even nuke lobbyists characterize the technology as “competitive”.
Nonetheless, US nuclear energy output passed all previous records in 2002, 9/11 concerns and a de facto moritorium on new construction notwithstanding.
Stats seem to be all over the place.
http://www.energybulletin.net/5950.html
Diaz estimate the cost of building a new 1,100- to 1,200- megawatt nuclear plant at $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion
It was also my understanding that with nuclear plants you could just build new reactors at a pre-existing plant instead of building an entirely new plant if you wanted to build more power, which is cheaper than building entirely new plants. But that less expensive alternative of adding onto pre-existing plants instead of building new ones may exist for most forms of power (except wind and solar) and not just nuclear.
There is another important consideration too with coal plants, along those lines, Wesley. Adding new units to an existing plant site is cheaper than greenfield, as the land is paid for, permitting is much easier, transport schemes are already set up, ash and other waste disposal already in place, the coal yard is built, administration buildings are on-site, T&D is already routed to the plant… Sure, most items would need to be upsized or uprated to handle the additional capacity, but overall the cost of a 1000MW plant added to an existing site may be as low as 2/3 of what a greenfield plant would be.
The numbers you are looking for are all over the place because the conditions and variations under which these plants are built varies widely.
Many utilities rely on the Electric Power Research Institutes (EPRI) data within their Technical Assesmant Guide (TAG). The info is proprietery so I can’t republish anything from them.
Since all power plants are not 1000 MW most comparison is done on a per KW cost basis. To get a 1000 MW figure just multiply the $/kw by 1,000,000. As for an answer to your question, here is a range of costs for each technology based on my experience reviewing publically available publications other (my caveat) than the TAG:
Coal $1200 - 2400 /kw
Nuclear $ ? - (GE and Westinghouse have proprietary info that they will not even allow EPRI to publish and I’ve never worked on pricing for that typw of plant, my guess is that the construction costs aren’t too far above coal) None are being built due to higher operating and regulation costs
Hydro and - $? - Again, the roadblock issue is not the construction costs but the siting and regulation costs
Geo - site specific and difficult to price - My guess is that construction costs are around $1000 /kw but the operating costs are pretty high
Natural Gas (combustion Turbine) - $200 - $600 /kw - Cheap to build but expensive to operate due to high fuel costs
Natural Gas (Combined Cycle) - $400-$1000 /kw - more costly to build but cheaper to run than combustion turbine.
Wind - $1000 - $2000 /kw
Fuel Cells - $2000 - $3000 /kw
Solar Photovoltaic - $5000 - $10,000 /kw
Solar Thermal - $4000 -$8000 /kw
Note that all of these costs are costs to build only; not to operate. From inspection of just the build costs one would be tempted to build only natural gas combustion turbines. But the overall cost to supply energy also includes the operating costs and a combustion turbine would be much more expensive to supply power for long term use compared to a coal unit. Combustion turbines come in handy for load spikes. Example during hot weather the combustion turbines may run to supply air conditioner load. Round-the-clock energy is supplied by coal units since they are the cheapest to run for continuous use.
I just had to come back and address this statement. The idea that any technology is disadvantaged because the energy companies find it competitive is too weak to be a serious factor for development.
Energy companies sell energy. They understand grid and off-grid energy very well and if the integration of the two is cost competitive you can bet that the energy companies would be in there selling both products. Most energy companies are mandated to find ways to lessen customer loads (usually called Demand Side Resources) and would love to find economical ways for the customer to offset some energy. If you think about it the energy company would love to deliver a constant product but rising temperatures cause the electric company to vary their delivery with the customers need. The energy company has to be able to supply the demand and if that demand occurs during the summer (hot) months then the energy company has to build power plants that only operate in the summer. Solar power would go a long way to letting the energy companies avoid building “summer-only” plants and could save the company from investing in power plants that only work part of the year.
So why isn’t solar being built? Because its still way too expensive…even compared to building a plant that only operates a few times a year. Plain fact. It’s not competitive greed that limits solar. Its the plain old fact that it costs way to much to build.
What? Everything I’ve read suggests that nuke plants are far more expensive to build than coal plants.
Not to downplay the nuclear controversy, but it seems to me that the total cost differential as estimated by MIT could explain the reluctance of utilities to install new nukes on its own.
I’m not sure what “regulation costs” are. If they involve mandated “safety features” during plant construction, we may be talking at cross-purposes.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Or, that is, I see part of it. It is obviously good for the company to sell more energy… except when selling more energy means that they have to build more power plants, which only operate on a seasonal basis. This is a bummer. So are you saying that selling a means for consumers to supply some of their own off-grid power is a means by which those consumers will make up the slack themselves? I hope that I misunderstood that, because it sounds to me like a totally bass-akwards way to combine on and off-grid power. The way I’ve always understood it was the other way around - the off-grid panels on the consumer’s house (or apartment building, or whatever - and therein lies a great challenge for off-grid power, I can now see: apartment dwellings) are the principle power supply, and the grid makes up the slack. That seems most cost effective to the owner of the PV panels. Anyway, I’d appreciate you explaining this more clearly, please :).
In any case, I’m not trying to characterize the problem as “competitive greed.” I am aware that corporations are supposed to make money. They would certainly sell (and do sell) solar panels to people, but they are sold by size and possibly capability, as opposed to by the megawatt hour. When a consumer uses a combination of on and off-grid power, they will save money in the long run, which means that they will pay less to the energy company in the long run. I can’t imagine that said company sees this as a good deal.
That aside, it’s true - solar power is still too expensive for general adoption. It’s too expensive for most consumers to invest in panels, and much too expensive for most companies to invest in plants. The problem I see is a perception that there are problems with solar power beyond the high cost of manufacturing the needed components, when such problems do not, in fact, exist, and a general misapprehension that the power grid is the best way to deliver energy under all circumstances.
Aw, crap, and now I’m guilty of hijacking a GQ thread :smack: .