DOE Report: Renewables Currently Cheaper Than "Clean" Coal

Here's another nugget from the US Department of Energy's 2007 report on carbon sequestration. You have to read between the lines to extract the lesson, but this message is there:

Renewable energy is currently cheaper than clean coal.

The DOE proves it in three easy steps.

Step 1 (page 5)

The overall goal of the Carbon Sequestration Program is to develop, by 2012, fossil fuel conversion systems that achieve 90 percent CO2 capture with 99 percent storage permanence at less than a 10 percent increase in the cost of energy services.

Step 2 (page 9)

It is believed that a 10 percent cost of electricity (COE) increase would significantly reduce impact to the economy. This level will also enable fossil fuel systems with CO2 capture and sequestration to compete with other power generation options to reduce the GHG intensity of energy supply, including wind, biomass, and nuclear power.

Presumably, then, DOE believes if you increase the cost of electricity from coal more than 10%, it can no longer compete with alternatives. (Okay, so they omitted solar and included nuclear, but hang on.)

Step 3 (page 17-18)

Preliminary analysis…indicates…that CO2 capture….could raise the cost of electricity from a new supercritical PC power plant by 65%, from 5.0 cents/kWh to 8.25 cents/kWh.

Analysis….show that CO2 capture and compression raises…..the cost of electricity from a newly built IGCC power plant by 30%, from an average of 7.8 cents/kWh to 10.2 cents/kWh.

So they've got until 2012, according to their plan, the bring the cost of clean coal technology down. Way down.

Let's see. They pulled the plug on FutureGen a couple of days ago because of ballooning costs.

The Bush administration, in a major policy reversal, canceled its support for a planned $1.8 billion coal-gasification plant that was supposed to herald a new era of emissions-free power but instead has been plagued by huge cost overruns.

Clean energy is moving in the opposite direction.

A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar shipped its first solar panels -- priced at $1 a watt. That's the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal.

Maybe one day the DOE will come out and just say the plain truth in one easy step. This is about as close as they come:

The long-term viability of various fuel conversion pathways – including pulverized coal (PC) combustion, integrated gasification combined-cycle, biomass gasification, and coal-to-liquids --may hinge on the availability of cost effective CCS technologies.

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