UNSW researchers have compared fossil fuel and CCS with renewables and found coal fired electricity’s days may be numbered – the figures simply don’t stack up.
Government estimates of the prices for different generation technologies and fuels in 2030 were used in the research along with a number of possible future carbon and CCS prices.
The results demonstrate coal based electricity generation plus carbon capture and storage are likely to be not competitive with 100 percent renewable energy – and the same would apply to gas with CCS if gas pricing should hit export parity.
Projected costs in 2030 for supercritical black coal generation technologies with carbon capture and storage were estimated to be (in 2012 dollars) $4,453 per kilowatt capacity for capital costs, $107 per kilowatt capacity per year for fixed operational costs and $18 per megawatt hour per year for variable operational costs.
For solar PV; the costs in 2030 are estimated to be $1,482 per kilowatt capacity for capital costs, $25 per kilowatt capacity per year for fixed operational costs and $0 per megawatt hour per year for variable operational costs.
“The research confirms that policies pursuing very high penetrations of renewable electricity, based on commercially available technologies, offer a reliable, affordable and low risk way to dramatically cut emissions in the electricity sector,” says Associate Professor Mark Diesendorf of the Institute of Environmental Studies.
“There is no need to invest in new, expensive, unproven, high-risk, fossil fuel technologies.”
While renewable energy technologies have been evolving rapidly, Professor Diesendorf says large-scale carbon capture and storage systems for electricity generation still haven’t materialised and could be decades from commercial deployment.
There are a dozen or so large-scale CCS demonstration projects operating or being constructed globally, but the majority of these projects have been developed to capture emissions from gas processing facilities, not power stations.
The UNSW team’s discussion paper can be viewed here (PDF).
