Coal's still cheaper
DON SUSRBER BLOG
When solar beats 6 cents per kilowatt hour, Americans will buy it.
David Roberts at the Gristmill blog is all excited by a report that it may cost less per watt/hour to build a solar energy plant than a new coal plant.
His overreaction is called "Solar cheaper than coal and falling: New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber."
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not hardly.
He's a little bit confused by capital costs and operational costs and over how clean solar power is.
He is happy that new technology makes it possible to build solar for $2 per watt/hour produced vs. $2.10 for a new coal plant.
Great. But he overlooks the part in the stories he cites that say solar will have to cost $1 per watt/hour produced to beat coal.
Why is that?
According to the reports he cites, it will take a full square mile of solar panels to produce 175 megawatts/hour at a cost of 10 cents per kilowatt/hour.
The John Amos plant in my back yard (OK across the river) produces 2,900 megawatts/hour — for 6 cents/kilowatt hour.
Even if solar were cheaper, you still have the capital expenses to consider.
At $2/watt hour produced, it would cost $5.8 billion to replace John Amos, which is already built. Spending a billion to retrofit it with even more scrubbers is still cheaper than abandoning it for solar.
And it would take 16.5 square miles of mirrors to do so. That's a goodly portion of Appalachian mountainside to cover.
So forget replacing coal. It produces half the electricity used in the United States.
In fact, at $2/watt hour, it would cost $8 trillion to replace all our electricity with solar and the panels would cover a state the size of West Virginia.
Still 10 cents/kilowatt hour is a good price. The national average is 10.6 cents.
In Hawaii they pay 23 cents/kilowatt hour. In Connecticut, 18.8. Those are statewide averages.
But I doubt that they will go solar completely. The reason is land cost. You see, on top of that $2/watt hour produced, the tree huggers are going to have to buy some land.
I mean, unless they want to solar-panel the national parks system.
Land is not cheap in Hawaii or Connecticut.
There are also the same water issues that coal (and nuke and etc.) faces as well as where will all this steam produced during the day going to be stored until used to spin the turbines at night?
But we already have that water issue and engineers will figure out the steam thing.
I am not making fun here. I am saying it is just not feasible.
Today.
Solar power will never replace coal (and folks, relax, we have enough to last us a few hundred years). You are getting about 4,000 times as much electricity from coal today as from solar.
The real opportunity is in reducing the rise in dependency on coal. America's electric use is expected to grow by 1 percent a year for the next 30 years. If solar can cut the increase in coal use by half, it will do the nation a great service.
The piece by David Roberts overlooks operating expenses for solar energy and overstates and the damage by coal and never considers that solar also harms the Earth. I don't see how covering 16 square miles of Putnam County, W.Va., with mirrors to replace the John Amos plant is really all that good for the environment.
And really, truly, I don't want to pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour for what I now pay a mere 6 cents.
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