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The numbers in this article make no sense: "The PPA undercuts a previous price agreed with NV Energy last year - $0.46/kWh from SunEdison’s 100 MW Boulder Sola

The numbers in this article make no sense: "The PPA undercuts a previous price agreed with NV Energy last year - $0.46/kWh from SunEdison’s 100 MW Boulder Solar Project – and could quite possibly be the cheapest electricity in the U.S." $0.46/kWh is outrageously exensive. Anybody could undercut that. "NV Energy, a Nevada-based utility owned by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, has agreed to pay just $0.3.87/kWh for solar electricity from the 100 MW Playa Solar 2 project being developed by U.S. thin film company First Solar." What is "$0.3.87/kWh" supposed to even mean? It may sound pedantic, and what they might be saying is that the electricity is $0.0387/kWh versus $0.046/kWh" - but the entire point of the article is specificity around the prices, you would think they would nail that - particularly in something called "pv-magazine.com" A much more substantive critique - how much of that low price is a result of government subsidies, and what is the "natural, unsubsidized price", and, also, how will that price change as subsidies for solar expire at the end of this year? [Edit, a few minutes later - the style of numbering with the weird placement of the decimals is consistent throughout the article, and one I've never seen before in an english language article - is anyone else familiar with it? Makes reading the article extremely challenging.]

thephyber 11y ago
The prices in the article look like they were all run through a script to "fix" the formatting by adding a decimal point two digits from the right (without checking to see if there was already a decimal point in the price). Note that the last link in the article has the text "$0.5.85/kWh agreed by Dubai’s state-backed DEWA utility in January", but the slug of the article is "six-cent-energy-is-not-the-new-normal". I agree that the prices seem useless in their current formatting.
pjc50 11y ago
Try this version which is closer to the original press release and hasn't garbled the prices: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/buffett-scores-cheapest-electricity-rate-with-nevada-solar-farms http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/buffett-sc... "Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s NV Energy agreed to pay 3.87 cents a kilowatt-hour ... Last year the utility was paying 13.77 cents a kilowatt-hour for renewable energy ... The utility also agreed to pay 4.6 cents a kilowatt-hour for power from SunPower Corp.’s 100-megawatt Boulder Solar project."

thephyber 11y ago

The prices in the article look like they were all run through a script to "fix" the formatting by adding a decimal point two digits from the right (without checking to see if there was already a decimal point in the price). Note that the last link in the article has the text "$0.5.85/kWh agreed by Dubai’s state-backed DEWA utility in January", but the slug of the article is "six-cent-energy-is-not-the-new-normal". I agree that the prices seem useless in their current formatting.

pjc50 11y ago

Try this version which is closer to the original press release and hasn't garbled the prices: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/buffett-scores-cheapest-electricity-rate-with-nevada-solar-farms http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/buffett-sc... "Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s NV Energy agreed to pay 3.87 cents a kilowatt-hour ... Last year the utility was paying 13.77 cents a kilowatt-hour for renewable energy ... The utility also agreed to pay 4.6 cents a kilowatt-hour for power from SunPower Corp.’s 100-megawatt Boulder Solar project."