Trash Incineration is the Most Expensive Way to Make Energy

The vari­able oper­a­tions and main­te­nance (O&M) costs are as follows:

Vari­able O&M costs include fuel and oth­er con­sum­able mate­ri­als and sup­plies; raw water; waste and waste­water dis­pos­al expens­es; pur­chased pow­er (incurred inverse­ly to oper­at­ing hours), demand charges and relat­ed util­i­ties; chem­i­cals, cat­a­lysts and gas­es; ammo­nia for selec­tive cat­alyt­ic reduc­tion (SCR), as applic­a­ble; and lubricants.

Source: “Updat­ed Cap­i­tal Cost Esti­mates for Util­i­ty Scale Elec­tric­i­ty Gen­er­at­ing Plants,” Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion, April 2013, p.6, Table 1. Full report here: www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/pdf/updated_capcost.pdf

To sum­ma­rize the EIA table in the charts above, we did the following:

• Bio­mass: used the bub­bling flu­idized bed type, since com­bined cycle requires gasi­fi­ca­tion and bio­mass gasi­fi­ca­tion is high­ly unusu­al (most are con­ven­tion­al boil­ers or flu­idized bed)
• Coal: this is an aver­age of sin­gle and dual advanced pul­ver­ized coal (the tra­di­tion­al sorts of coal plants that can no longer be built in the U.S.)
• Geot­her­mal: took the aver­age of the two types
• Hydro­elec­tric: includ­ed only con­ven­tion­al and not pumped hydro­elec­tric (nei­ther of which tends to be proposed)
• Nat­ur­al Gas: this is an aver­age of con­ven­tion­al and advanced com­bined cycle (the typ­i­cal plants built, since com­bus­tion tur­bines and fuel cells are not com­mon­ly proposed)
• Solar pho­to­volta­ic: this is an aver­age of large and small