Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
promising, though it has so far failed all attempts to scale
up processes developed in the laboratory to industrial size.
Phase-
(advanced) has not delivered yet and a study by
the US National Academy of Science indicates that algal
biofuels cannot do the job. Almost all of the research
money is going to short-term programs, which is a mis-
take. There will be no revolutionary advances as we are
going now. I rate biofuels as maybes.
.
Cost
Cost is an issue in deploying emission-free energy sources.
I have the feeling that the advocates of the renewables do
not want the citizens who pay the bill to know how much
they are paying. I like to think that we are all grown-ups
and realize that a new technology is likely to be expensive
at
first, but will come down as more is deployed. Hiding
the story is not right, so here is the story.
Figure
shows the levelized cost at the power plant of
various electricity sources in the United States (levelized
costing takes the capital costs for a plant and spreads them
uniformly over the life of the plant). I have explicitly shown
the effect of the federal solar PV subsidy which is paid by
the taxpayers, not
.
the utilities. Also shown is
the
first analysis I have seen of the cost to the system of the
variability of wind. It is from a
report by the Royal
Academy of Engineering in the UK [
]. While the RAE
report is not new, it is the
first serious attempt that I have
found to account for the added costs produced by the need
to
firm up the highly variable output of wind systems.
There is a
report from Texas Tech University that
reaches the same conclusion for the United States [
]. It is
