Item — HN Reader

Does anyone have a good cost comparison of nuclear, gas, coal/lignite ? Total cost, with decommission. My understanding is that even with Carbon Tax coal is cheaper.

From HN comment: > Take the average IPCC meta-analysis numbers [1] at face value: 820 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas. Those are both extraordinarily high. This is because they both combust carbon in the presence of oxygen to form energy and CO2. They're both very high-carbon fuel sources. If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions, we need to build things that do not combine C + O2 to make CO2 + energy. Options with less than 50g CO2-eq/kWh (in decreasing order of emissions) include solar (41), geothermal (38), hydro (24), tidal (17), nuclear (12), and wind (11).

3 comments

The investment analysis firm Lazards publishes detailed reports on LCOE every year. These are current costs per MWh without subsidies [1]:

  Nuclear            : $118 to 192
  Solar with storage : $102 - 139  
  Gas                : $44 - 68
  Wind               : $28 - 54
  Solar PV           : $32 - 42

They don't include carbon pricing which will increase solars price a bit, it should also push its carbon output from manufacture down as it will be more economical to optimize it.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019

Gas CCGT is usually long run cheaper than coal once you include CO2 cost. But old and existing coal plants can often beat new build gas CCGT because theyre fully depreciated and have financing paid off. Additionally it's got a lot harder to finance new build CCGT and is pretty much impossible to finance new build coal these days in most markets.

Depending on the market, offshore wind can be cheaper than gas because of that effect and because of scale (the newest wind turbines are absolutely enormous) even ex subsidy.

Nobody does. Nuclear power plants don’t get built without assurances and help from the state.