Solar power costs half what coal costs

[jpak]

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3271101/green-it/solar-power-costs-half-what-coal-costs.html

New solar installs are contributing the same amount of electricity as building one new coal-fueled power station annually in Australia, according to the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).

“We are essentially seeing the [equivalent] of a new power plant being built every season,” AEMO chief Audrey Zibelman told the Sydney Morning Herald.

One reason rooftop adoption in Australia is exploding, the paper wrote, is because of government subsidies. However, there’s another financial driver of alternative power globally, which is the full-lifecycle cost of building and operating — it’s now lower.

<snip>

Lazard says the cost of producing one megawatt-hour of solar-produced electricity in North America is currently $50, compared to $102 for coal-origination. It says that in 2009 it would have cost $359 to produce that level of power with utility-scale solar arrays, and $111 with coal-fired power stations. Wind-power comes in even cheaper at $45 per megawatt-hour today.

<more>

[donkeypoofed]

1. But Drumpf wants to bring America back to 1955...

And ALL the above info contradicts that. Bringing back coal and having grandfathers,fathers and sons all working in the same mine will make it feel like the 1950's again! Yippeeee

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

2. It's just a no-brainer

but...hey...congress has nothing to do but wit for the phone to ring and money to come in, for alt. viewpoints.

[VMA131Marine]

3. This is really positive news, but

nobody is building new coal plants in the US anyway. Here's a link to the US EIA's report on the cost of new energy generation:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf

Table 1b has the bottom line numbers in $/MWh. Solar PV are cheaper than anything else except onshore wind, geothermal, and (barely) advanced CC. Coal generation with carbon capture is completely uneconomic

CC - Combined Cycle
CT - Combustion Turbine
CCS - Carbon Capture and Storage

Dispatchable technologies
Coal with 30% CCS - 130.1
Coal with 90% CCS - 119.1
Conventional CC - 50.1
Advanced CC - 49.0
Advanced CC with CCS - 74.9
Conventional CT - 98.7
Advanced CT - 85.1
Advanced nuclear - 92.6
Geothermal - 41.6
Biomass - 95.3

Non-dispatchable technologies
Wind, onshore - 48.0
Wind, offshore - 117.1
Solar PV - 49.9
Solar thermal - 126.6
Hydroelectric - 61.7

[NeoGreen]

4. Life..cycle...costs...

...I wonder what nuclear comes in at?

Ahh, it's in the chart:



Nuclear LCC/MWH in 2009: $123
Nuclear LCC/MWH in 2017: $148


Well, look at that, nuclear is the only one listed that went up in price between 2009 and 2017.

Wonders never cease.

[hunter]

5. Not really...

... solar and wind will always be supplemental.

It's the natural gas that scares me.

[OxQQme]

6. Very heartening, but what is one megawatt-hour?

So I googled this: https://www.cleanenergyauthority.com/solar-energy-resources/what-is-a-megawatt-and-a-megawatt-hour

--> "A megawatt is a unit for measuring power that is equivalent to one million watts. One megawatt is equivalent to the energy produced by 10 automobile engines.

A megawatt hour (Mwh) is equal to 1,000 Kilowatt hours (Kwh). It is equal to 1,000 kilowatts of electricity used continuously for one hour. It is about equivalent to the amount of electricity used by about 330 homes during one hour."

So at $50 per mw/hr that doesn't make sense.
One home for 330 hours is the other way to see this?
Or if true, users are getting ripped.

Either way, bring on the alternatives.

Nikola Tesla knew how to pull energy right out of the air.

[caraher]

7. I'm a little confused about the confusion

Yes, one home for 330 hours and 330 homes for one hour would both be the same amount of energy - 1 MWh, according to your source's assumptions.

$50 per MWh works out to 5 cents per kWh, which is indeed less than the retail cost most US customers pay for electricity. You might call it a ripoff, but realize that the solar prices quoted are historic lows. This also illustrates just one of many reasons why coal is going away despite President Cheeto's bluster.

But regarding Tesla, there's no free lunch. Just because he had a scheme for power distribution that was wireless does not mean he was magically producing energy from nothing. And there are some really challenging problems for long-distance wireless power distribution.

“Exposure to very high RF energy will heat you—there’s no question about that,” says Richard Strickland, who runs the consultancy RF Safety Solutions. He points out that RF exposure guidelines differ from place to place. In the United States, for example, many follow IEEE’s C95.1 standard, whereas Europeans generally adhere to the somewhat stricter guidelines of the International Commission on NonIonizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP).

Consideration of those limits should be sobering to anyone hoping to send significant amounts of power using electromagnetic fields. Take the ICNIRP guidelines for RF fields at 10 megahertz, the frequency of the system Soljacic and his MIT colleagues built. For this frequency, those guidelines indicate that the general public should not be exposed to magnetic fields in excess of 0.073 ampere per meter, or to electric fields greater than 28 volts per meter. Were this RF energy radiated from a distant antenna, you could apply either the magnetic or the electric-field limit alone, because the ratio of the fields would be a fixed quantity. But inductive power transfer of this kind takes place in what is known as the near field of the antenna (the coil), so the relationship between the electric and magnetic fields is not so simple.

According to their 2007 Science paper, Soljacic and his colleagues measured a magnetic field of 1 A/m at the halfway point between transmitting and receiving coils—almost 14 times the ICNIRP limit. The electric field was 210 V/m, which tops the ICNIRP limit by a factor of 7.5. Things get even worse if you consider the fields closer to the coils. Twenty centimeters away, the magnetic field was more than 100 times—and the electric field 50 times—the ICNIRP limit.

“They are not going to be able to fill a room with fields and not come up with issues,” says Grant Covic, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand. He should know: Covic and his Auckland faculty colleague John Boys have been working for two decades on the engineering of such systems, which, despite having garnered little publicity, are in fact used widely for a variety of applications where power cords would be problematic.