(disclaimer: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group) I just want to jump in here because these numbers are all strange. The author mixes units all over the

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group) I just want to jump in here because these numbers are all strange. The author mixes units all over the place (e.g. MW vs MWh). The article confuses nameplate capacity and marginal cost. And there is no mention of capacity factor or dispatchability. Very simply, the current state of the world: - Renewable energy is getting more popular, and has zero marginal cost. That means they always sell to the grid, regardless of cost, and drive high variability in daily demand. - Coal and nuclear have higher capital costs, and thus require 90%+ utilization to stay competative with natural gas. However, demand is low for a quarter the day now, so they are out. There is no saving coal, no matter how much political rhetorical goes into it, the economics do not work out. - Renewables by themseles are not dispatchable. Do not confuse them with natural gas/coal/hydro/nuclear. - Renewables+storage would be dispatchable (especially if you add HVDC to lower variability), and this gets us into the actual numbers from the article... Lets do some math Batteries currently cost about $150/kWh. That will continue to come down, but let's say we want to build a plant in the next 5 years, so maybe $100/kWh if we are really lucky. For a 200MW dispatchable solar/wind plant, we'd have: - ~25% capacity factor would be very optimistic (they aren't building in an ideal location in CO). - That means 800MW of nameplate capacity to get an average of 200MW output. - $1/W nameplate for solar these days => 800MW nameplate plant at $800M for just the solar. - $100/kWh for batteries. Even if we only needed 24h of storage (though realistically you need more like 3 days), that means 200MW24h$150/kWh => $480M => Total plant cost is $1.28B, for 200MW of output, or $6400/kW. Let's say we have For 30 years, with a 5% rate of return on capital (3% over inflation), and a 1% O&M/y cost (this is really low, just to give it a fighting change, 3-6% is typical), that ends up as.... 5.5 cents/kWh. Which is way above natural gas (4 cents/kWh), so they'd never take it without federal subsidies. Any bid below that isn't likely to be fully dispatchable, which makes it even less competative with natural gas, even if it is cheaper. It's hard to compete with a low-capital cost power plant that has nearly free energy flowing out of a hole in the ground.