An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles

Inhabit reports that one study in North Carolina shows solar-produced electricity from a new plant clocking in at 14 cents/killowatt hour, while nuclear-produced electricity clocks in at 16 cents. This is big news, potentially, for reasons I touched on here: photovoltaic solar (i.e. solar-produced electricity, as opposed to passive solar heating)  has been improving in leaps and bounds over the last decade or so, and as it does, it starts to cut into the profitability of dirtier energy sources.

Bulky, expensive, fragile glass panels are giving way to cheaper, flexible vinyl ones. Increased demand (especially from China) has allowed companies that make solar panels to scale up their operations, making each panel cheaper. There are still some drawbacks–those are some very large, non-renewable silicon wafers they use, the cheaper thin-film cells are a few percent less efficient than the crystalline cells, and so on.

The folks at Inhabit point out that this study isn’t even the tip-top of the solar world: this study used regular flat-panel-generated power, not any of the sexy concentrating reflectors shown above. And North Carolina isn’t exactly the sunniest place on earth. Moreover, they show the cost of nuclear power rising. Nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to construct, and when states use nuclear to add to their electric output, those costs get split between the consumers and taxpayers–it’s not like the company is going to just eat the cost. You can download the complete study, done by Duke and NC WARN, here. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with their money graph (though I don’t know why they insisted on using straight lines for their best fit curve, when the cost of nuclear is definitely more of an S-curve), and one of my favorite ever solar power station: this one in Seville, Spain, that channels sunlight toward a giant boiler/turbine tower. It works on the same principle as a coal burning plant, but with sunlight instead of coal. And it’s literally awesome: