It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.
Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.
Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.
We need to grow our renewables faster and optimizing our energy use. There is so much waste we can cut. We can also “load shift” to spread out our demand. There is so much we have barely started.
LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.
LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.
And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.
For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically
Using USA-only statistics in a thread about Slovakia and the UK is disingenuous at best.
It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.
Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.
Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.
We need to grow our renewables faster and optimizing our energy use. There is so much waste we can cut. We can also “load shift” to spread out our demand. There is so much we have barely started.
Says who? A quick bit of research shows that natural gas is cheaper, and it probably depends on the location and availability of each.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
We’re both correct.
LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.
LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.
For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.
And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.
Using USA-only statistics in a thread about Slovakia and the UK is disingenuous at best.