Energy stations?
Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at
8:36 pm
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Filed under: Wind Power
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I did a quick search using these terms:
"wind farm" O&M
(O&M = Operations and Maintenance)
This turned up several sources saying that it’s hard to estimate, so I’m going to assume that they’re right.
I don’t know. but, I an tell you this, we dont need the power company. If you want free power I can tell you how
Costs to run are not very large part of the picture for solar or wind… it is almost all initial capital cost, which is very much higher than for a coal plant that puts out comparable amounts of kWh.
Nuclear plants too are very capital intensive.
Because of extensive front end cost loading for wind, solar and nuclear the big imponderable is longevity and maintenance cost. Thus far most of those plants have lasted a shorter time and had more maintenance cost than originally projected.
The big problem in evaluating this is that with wind and solar, you need to have a backup plant capable of providing the whole demand… because wind and solar have zero base load capacity… their minimum output goes to zero.
That means we have not only a high capital cost for the solar or wind plant, but we also have the cost of the standby plant, maintenance on it etc, and of course fuel to run it when wind or solar are not producing.
check out this report
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Cost_of_Generating_Electricity.pdf
For solar, wind and Nucular, the main cost is in the initial construction. Coal is getting more expensive now, especially if the company doesn’t have a long term contract. There is much more than cost to think of when looking at feasibility. Nuclear needs to be located near large amounts of cooling water- waterfront property isn’t cheap now and those who do live near it don’t want a cooling tower within sight. Solar and wind are only good where they have a steady supply of their needed "resource". Coal needs to be near a coalmine or have access to rail lines that aren’t already congested.