...apart from their notion that it digresses somewhat to the idea of a chemical plant designed by chemical engineers, and apart from the social issue invoked by my group mates about the relevance of such plant, and of course apart from the terrible and tedious job of actually designing one, another would be because it is now more costly and less clean than solar photovoltaic systems. (Not that I am planning to design now a solar photovoltaic plant. I am not a photovoltaic engineer. I "know" someone who is. He studies at the University of New South Wales.)
Before it was solar energy that is too expensive to tap, making calculators with a small strip of a solar panel more expensive and stylish, now, according to The New York Time's Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage, solar photovoltaics have joined the ranks of lower-cost alternatives to new nuclear plants."
PARIS — Solar photovoltaic systems have long been painted as a clean way to generate electricity, but expensive compared with other alternatives to oil, like nuclear power. No longer. In a “historic crossover,” the costs of solar photovoltaic systems have declined to the point where they are lower than the rising projected costs of new nuclear plants, according to a paper published this month.
“Solar photovoltaics have joined the ranks of lower-cost alternatives to new nuclear plants,” John O. Blackburn, a professor of economics at Duke University, in North Carolina, and Sam Cunningham, a graduate student, wrote in the paper, “Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover.”
This crossover occurred at 16 cents per kilowatt hour, they said.
While solar power costs have been declining, the costs of nuclear power have been rising inexorably over the past eight years, said Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and Environment.
Read full article here.
