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Still, for years I've been reading that almost all new power generation capacity is renewable.
by perl4ever 6y ago
Still, for years I've been reading that almost all new power generation capacity is renewable.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI think because they're incremental. A plant that burns something costs billions. Another solar panel or wind tower can be built on a whim.
- perl4ever 6y agoThat's not my impression based on eia.gov. Natural gas and petroleum power generators are on the order of $700-800/kW to build, apparently. The majority of them are small, from a fraction of a MW to 2 or 3 MW. Seems like they must be on the order of a few millions to build or less, unless they are very different from the average. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoCould be. One of the top 10 biggest generation plants in the world is natural gas. And smaller plants have an issue - they're nearly net zero return (profit). So not a lot of investment reasons to build them. Solar is net negative, so there's that against it too. We've screwed up the market with subsidies and laws, so its hard to tell what the right answer is.