![]() | The Oil Drum Celebrates 3M unique visits and 8M page views | The Oil Drum | ASPO-USA: Support for Global Energy Flow modelling and a Net Energy database | ![]() |
272 comments on DrumBeat: November 1, 2006
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
272 comments on DrumBeat: November 1, 2006
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- Passive Solar Design Overview – Part 1
- Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
- TOD:Campfire RSS feed
TOD:Europe
- SER-2 [01] Introduction
- The Russian Bear?
- The Permanent Oil Crisis Conference in Amsterdam, January 21 & 22, 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- 2009: Predictions for Australia
- The Bullroarer - Tuesday 6th January 2009
- The Bullroarer - Monday 29th December 2008
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
—James Madison, FEDERALIST #57 (1787)
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Heading Out
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.





GAIA Host Collective
- nuclear - 8 cents/ kwhr (case can be made long term why that might fall towards 7 cents)
- onshore wind - 4-9 cents
- offshore wind - 5-11 cents
- CCGT - 4 cents (depends massively on gas price)
- Coal - c. 5 cents (higher capital cost than CCGT, but much lower fuel cost)
- IGCC Coal - c. 6 cents
- solar - 15 cents (in some applications)
Carbon sequestration will add 1-5 cents/ kwhr to coal and CCGT.You can see that no one would build anything other than coal and (a little) gas turbine power unless you have carbon pricing.
In practice no one source solves it. You can see how the UK can get to 20% wind, but its hard to see, practically, without new power storage technologies, how we would get to more than that.
I assume this is total Capital construction and operating costs to provide electricity at rates you quote. If your costs are only construction than the monthly consumable cost on coal and NG are variables that will increase in the future.
In any case what the costs don't include are the carbon implications (that you show need to be included for parity with wind) but also the unseen costs of obtaining the coal and NG supply. IMHO one of the reasons coal is so cheap is that the environmental impacts of coal mining are delayed way into the future. Before 1981 or '82 strip mining operations had 7 years to return the land to similar vegetation as before mining. Under the Reagan administration that time frame was delayed to (I think) 20 years. This means a lot of natural weathering can occur on the spoils piles before they need to be re-vegetated. I remember this because I interviewed at a company that had a huge business in using plants to reclaim disturbed land. They went bankrupt 5 years or so later because their entire business model disappeared.
The reason the 7 years was tough on strip miners is that you need specialized plants to be the first communities to establish. Lots of heavy metals and acids that require phytosequestration to clean up the soil allowing conventional plants to grow. After twenty years the soils are leeched and lots of stuff will grow. The problem is, where does the leech water go? It may run off or it may be contained and go down. In all cases it is going to impact aquafers negatively. These costs are then picked up by entities other than the miners. This keeps the cost of coal cheap but adds to the other problems of burning coal
Don't get me wrong, I think coal mining is a valid way to provide energy. I am just of the opinion that it can be done in a much less ecologically destructive way, albeit at a higher cost. But the rules and framework have to apply (and apply to all) or there is no incentive for the operations that want to do things right. They have a lot of added costs without being able to ask more for the coal. More likely the price for coal will go down if we allow the "most efficient" ways of extraction to be used without regard to down stream consequences.
(some of the people who post around here who are pro nuke use much lower numbers 4 cents even).
A massive factor is capital cost-- even in a gas fired CCGT, where fuel is half the lifecycle cost, capital costs matter. Change the real interest rate (interest rate after inflation) and nuclear and wind look a lot worse, or a lot better.
This is why gas turbines took off in the 90s. Gas was cheap, and capital costs were the most important costs. There was also an important efficiency shift (the Combined Cycle bit) which raised efficiencies from c. low 40%s to nearly 60% now. Gas is however no longer cheap.
Conversely nuclear plants wound up being delayed by several years, and in the high inflation/ high real interest rate environment of the late 70s and 80s, that meant their total costs were several times initial estimates.
If we can assume a world where nuclear plants really do get built on budget, in 5 years, then nuclear will look a lot cheaper but you will still have the waste problem and cost.
Good point about the true cost of coal. I think most US power coal now comes from the Powder River Basin Wyoming, which has low sulphur coal and high productivity open-pit mining. One of the big costs is then rail transport, whereas ocean transport of Australian coal is relatively cheap.
I think Appalachian coal is a decreasing fraction of coal consumption except for coking coal and for power stations that are very close to source.
The reality is, ex environmental considerations, any US utility (virtually) would rather build a coal fired station. The risk is low, the technology proven, and the economics straightforward.
I live near the Ohio River at the WV/ Ohio border and I was confused when I first moved here by the fact that coal moves in both directions on the Ohio River. There must be at least 5 to 10 coal barges with 12 full containers each going downriver from WV daily. This really surprised me at first until it was explained to me that Iowa coal is brought upriver to WV to mix this expensive low sulfur coal with the inexpensive high sulfur WV coal so WV and Ohio coal burning plants can use their cheap coal and not have to use expensive scrubbers. Also WV coal is shipped to Iowa and other places and mixed with their coal in plants there. Cost/ benefit ratios force everyone to keep their sulfur emissions right at the legal limit even if it creates absurdities like shipping dirty WV coal west where coal is plentiful and cleaner.
Whatever happened to Free-Wheelin Franklin & Fat Freddy?
In countries without such activist capital sabotage, you have very inexpensive nuclear power, and it is good to remember that nuclear plants have operational lifetimes of over 40 years, often 60.
But nuclear waste costs almost nothing to manage. You stick it in a pool for a couple of years then stick it in concrete in a parking lot. The largest cost that US nuclear plants have to pay in regards to waste is the tax for the geologic repository that is still not built.
Once the thing is built, and once the debt raised to finance it is paid off or discharged, then the operating costs are massively cheap.
This is especially true for nuclear (pure maintenance and fuel costs probably 1-2 cents/kwhr) and wind (free fuel, minimal maintenance, complete replacement every 20 years).
But is also true of coal (probably the operating costs are c. 2.5-3 cents/ kwhr).
The economics argument is useless. We are talking about politics here. If the voter votes for it, clean energy is going to be built, even if it costs 10 cents more per kWh.
I certainly can afford to pay that much. So can many others.
I certainly can afford to pay that much. So can many others."
Unless they ban coal fired generation or impose carbon taxes, the voter has nothing to do with it. It boils down to a straight economic evaluation. Utilities have to install the most cost effective option, which will usually be coal.
Also, overwhelmingly, people will not willingly pay a single penny more per kwh, if they have a cheaper (dirtier) option. Did you notice how poorly the green energy companies did trying to sell their higher priced, cleaner electricity?
I am a big fan of a carbon tax, but I see no chance of it happening in the US.