Re: Solar Panels Cost of Ownership

Sorry, but I have to disagree on the cost of operating a nuclear plant.  The simple fact is that when buyers are able to freely choose the power they are going to buy the nuclear power consisyently comes in at ~ $35/MWh... That's dirt cheap by todays standards.

Back in 2001 when I got started the "brass ring" was $50/MWh for new generation.  That's because the notion of building a new nuke at that time was the equivalent of opening a "Californian Fried Condor" shop... It was simply taboo.

Coal was king, and $50 was the rate.  We were flirting with $86/MWh for solar but couldn't get folks to believe it, because: "If it was doable at that price, someone else would be doing it."  Gotta admire that kind of logic.

Well, the reason you don't hear a lot about the current price of nuclear power is because the contracts for it have all been bought up for the forseeable future.  Some of these plants have sold all of their power through 2015 and have options into the 2030's...

What this means is that if you are trying to "buy" nuclear energy today, you're looking at a brokered rate, so a lot of the cost is for the middleman markup, not the real cost of energy.

The days of shutting down a nuclear construction project with a $0.25 cent stamp are gone.  We need more nuclear power, because it's a virtually unlimited source of on-demand energy.  But I will argue that nuclear plants should replace; oil fired first, coal fired second, and gas fired third.  Then I want solar plants and distributed concentrating solar to nibble away at the nuclear and hydro plants so that the solar plants power society during the day, and the nuclear plants only operate at night... Yes, that's a bit fanciful, but it's a goal to strive for.