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A new Harvard University study examines the life cycle cost of coal power including all the resulting environmental and health expenses and found that although the coal itself might be cheap, the price of generating power from it is not. The study found that coal power actually costs the U.S. somewhere between $345 billion and $500 billion each year.
The study says that if all of those expenses were included in people's electricity bills, it would double to triple the cost of coal power, adding $0.09 - $0.27 per kWh, making it no longer the cheapest source of electricity, but one of the most expensive.
Some of the hidden expenses outlined in the study are elevated rates of cancer and other diseases in coal-mining regions, environmental damage to those areas (including water and air pollution), loss of tourism dollars and costs related to climate change.
The full study titled "Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal" will be published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences soon.
via Reuters and Greenpeace
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written by Peter Haken, February 18, 2011
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written by Steve, February 22, 2011
Are you kidding me!? Who do YOU think pays all those expenses?
Please use more common sense! You egg heads have no common sense. Many new energy technologies usually have no practical application because the people that develop it cannot see the world outside their four walls.
Lets make more electric cars! Everyone can come home from work, plug in their cars and save the planet. Yah!!
Except if 5M-10M people came home from work and plugged in their cars it would cause us to build a thousand new power plants to handle this electric load. This would be coal power...more than what was needed WITHOUT electric cars.
Use your heads for crying out loud!!
Some of the stuff I read on this site is ridiculous!!
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written by S.R. Morbley, February 23, 2011
Coal has been embedded in the industrial and economic
format of the developed world to where applying
new and alternate means of energy will be met with
too much resistance for immediate acceptance.
Therefore it be immediate. But it is eventual.
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written by Jim, February 23, 2011
The study is spot on in that the external costs of coal use go way beyond the costs of extraction and delivery. These costs are not reflected in the price of coal use however which leads to the illusion that coal is cheap. Driving a car without investing in maintenance is cheap too until it breaks down. Burning furniture and the back porch are cheap ways to stay warm until you run out and have to replace them or go to war with your neighbor to get his.
By choosing to ignore the real costs of our fossil fuel addiction, we keep it artificially low compared to renewables that factor in those avoided costs upfront. This does nothing more than prolong the inevitable and leave us less prepared for the future.
Look at it another way, unless you think that your ancestors are busy percolating into crude oil and coal, these sources run out some day. In addition to environmental and political security concerns, why wouldn't you want to tap energy sources which are numerous, available everywhere, benign and inexhaustible (the eventual destruction of our sun notwithstanding)?
Through efficiency, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, we have the technology to greatly reduce our use of fossil fuels and eventually eliminate them altogether. None is perfect, but all are a step in the right direction toward an inevitable future need which cannot be met in a last-minute rush program when the politics and environmental repercussions of our current energy strategy start to get REALLY ugly.
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written by Asaf Shalgi, February 25, 2011
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To take this impulse out of people is the same as instituting a 100% estate tax to break the link between wealth and birth: it goes against ingrained instincts.
Quite frankly, I think more people have to die before society gets the picture and wises up.