Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Australia:

Report: Solar, wind, landfill to make cheapest power by 2030. Not geothermal. (The Register)

(Courtesy CIA.gov)
Solar and wind technologies will be the cheapest way to make electricity by 2030, according to a new Australian Energy Technology Assessment (PDF) from Australia’s Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics.

The report, penned with help from consultancy WorleyParsons and the CSIRO, considered 40 different generation technologies and calculated a “Levelised Cost of Energy” (LCOE), “the minimum cost of energy at which a generator must sell the produced electricity in order to achieve its desired economic return” per megawatt hour.

Intriguingly, the report sees little success for geothermal energy, a resource Australia possesses in considerable quantities and also one that has generated some stock market excitement. Costs for that source aren’t projected as falling significantly even in the 2050s.

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