“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 160

their performance, but it's also allowed oil and gas drillers to pinpoint
petroleum deposits that were once impossible to exploit economically.
Cheap and strong materials, ot en identii ed as important to bringing
the cost of clean energy down, could also improve the performance of
things like natural-gas-i red power plants, whose turbines must operate
at staggeringly high temperatures and pressures.
h ere are, of course, innovations that would benei t new sources of
power but not older ones. Technologies that let companies store mas-
sive amounts of electricity and then sell when demand is high will help
smooth delivery of electricity from new intermit ent sources. h is will
turn equality in levelized cost into something closer to a real equality
of performance. But society can also expect big innovations that are far
more useful for traditional fuels than for new ones, particularly since
the massive size of the existing energy industry creates hugely tilted
incentives for companies to spend money on innovation in established
areas. h e technological advances that led to the commercial extraction
of shale gas, for example, will do nothing to directly propel cleaner
sources of fuel. 47
Even if new low-carbon power plants reach a point where they can
compete with new fossil-fuel facilities, a i nal barrier remains. New
power plants ot en aren't competing with new facilities; they're com-
peting with existing power plants to break into the market. Alas, much
of the cost of the power those existing plants produce has already been
paid for. About 1.3 cents of the cost of a kilowat -hour of natural gas
power is spent when you build the plant in the i rst place . 48 A new low-
carbon power plant therefore needs to beat the all-in cost of gas-i red
power by at least that much to muscle its way in. Coal makes for even
tougher competition. Once you've built a coal-i red power plant, you've
already paid for as much as i ve cents of the cost of every kilowat -
hour; the actual cost of generating a kilowat -hour of electricity is in
the neighborhood of only three cents. 49 h at's an extremely dii cult

bar to clear.
To be certain, power companies will retire some U.S. coal- and gas-
i red capacity, opening up space for new technologies to compete on
more even footing. But this will likely require new laws or regulations.
h e United States currently boasts just over 310 gigawat s of coal-i red