Combined-Cycle Natural Gas Power Beats Everything Else

Combined-cycle natural gas power plants offer lower cost electricity than anything else, especially renewables, the true costs of which are never counted.

Our friends at the Institute of Energy Research have come out with a study that finally examines the true costs of renewables, including their impacts on the efficiencies of other energy sources. The Energy Information Administration has long studied the “levelized costs of electricit” or LCOE of different sources of power but hasn’t accounted for all the hidden subsidies, which often take the form of indirect costs on other electricity producers. Combined-cycle natural gas power plants typically come out best anyway, but the spread is minimized by failure to consider these indirect costs. This latest study does address them and natural gas comes out way ahead.

The focus of the study was to compare the costs of new energy generators with existing, across the entire spectrum, and existing generators are far more efficient than either solar or wind. New combined-cycle natural gas power plants also come out as especially efficient. 

Read more:

https://naturalgasnow.org/combined-cycle-natural-gas-power-beats-everything-else/