Costs Surge for Building Power Plants

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/worldbusiness/10energy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

General Electric called in reporters yesterday for a briefing on a nuclear plant it is trying to sell in partnership with Hitachi, a plant it said can be built faster than before, operated reliably and have a vanishingly small chance of an accident.

But what will it cost? After some hemming and hawing, company executives gave figures by the standard industry metric, dollars per kilowatt of capacity, but in a huge range: $2,000 to $3,000.

“There’s massive inflation in copper and nickel and stainless steel and concrete,” said John Krenecki, president and chief executive of GE Energy. The uncertainty is not just in nuclear plants, he said; coal plant prices are now similarly unstable.

As talk of building new power plants rises sharply, so does the cost. A new fleet of coal-fired power plants and a revival of nuclear construction after three decades are both looking tougher lately.

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[NickB79]

1. This isn't limited to nuclear or fossil plants either

From your link:

"Renewable energy is not immune. “Costs have increased for wind as they have for other technologies,” said Christine Real de Azua, a spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association. “While wind farm operations are not hit by fuel price volatility, steep increases in the cost of raw materials like copper and steel and other factors have driven up the price of wind turbines,” she said in an e-mail statement."

Short answer: ALL forms of energy are becoming more expensive, and we only have a short period of time to build up our energy infrastructure before such large undertakings become impossible due to economic decline from peak fossil fuels and global warming.

[jpak]

2. However, the cost of PV modules is declining and will continue to decline

Silicon is cheap and abundant, and global capacity to produce PV-grade poly-Si is growing...

[NickB79]

3. With the costs of raw materials and energy increasing, I doubt that trend will continue

That is the major implication of peak fossil fuel: EVERYTHING gets more expensive.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. $2-3/W is huge?

Oops.

[bananas]

7. PV prices went up because of a sudden jump in demand

can't say the same about nuclear.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. yeah, from $4.30

huge-and-a-half is the cheapest they've ever been.

[phildo]

9. With PV, the modules are not the total cost . . .

To get the full effect, you have to add the costs of inverters (PV makes DC, the inverters create AC from the DC), add the mounting and tracking equipment and the install labor.

Real total installed and running cost generally comes out about $7 to $10 per watt.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. I'm being gentle. nt :)

[NNadir]

10. Really? You can't say because you are ignorant of the use of numbers.

The demand for nuclear power has been sold out now for many decades, since it is the only form of baseload power that produces on an exajoule scale.

Of course you don't know what an exajoule is or wish to deny the existence of exajoules because it is impossible to be a reflexive nuclear opponent if one understands numbers.

The solar industry proved incompetent to expand even though it does not produce one exajoule of electrcity. Indeed it has proved incompetent to expand even though it does not produce 0.1 exajoules of electricity.

I love posting this spreadsheet, because the reflexive antinuclear set is so pathetic as to continuously pretend it doesn't exist.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Since 1980, the demand for nuclear power has increased by 1,934 billion kilowatt-hours. The increase in demand for nuclear power in that period produces all of the non-hydro renewables on earth, which are essentially insignificant, the most insignificant being solar electricity.

[bananas]

5. This is exactly the kind of thing Al Gore was talking about

when he discussed this in Congress.

[NNadir]

6. He came to me in a dream though and said that there are great oil fields

and coal reserves under the glaciers of Greenland.

He also said I would lose weight and regrow my hair and that I should trust my horoscope next September.