A Jaw-Dropping World Record Solar Price Was Just Bid in Abu Dhabi

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is one of the largest producers of hydroelectricity in the state. In 2015, a dry year, it pegged its costs for hydro at 3.2 cents a kilowatt hour, compared to 6.1 cents a kilowatt hour for natural gas.

It’s not unusual to see hydro projects across the country coming in at 2 cents a kilowatt hour.

When it comes to the average retail price of electricity, California finishes sixth-highest in the country and fourth-highest for states in the continental U.S., at 15.42 cents a kilowatt hour.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hydropower-rain-20170307-story.html

At 2.42 cents per KWH you can’t afford NOT to leave the lights on!

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is one of the largest producers of hydroelectricity in the state. In 2015, a dry year, it pegged its costs for hydro at 3.2 cents a kilowatt hour, compared to 6.1 cents a kilowatt hour for natural gas.

Earlier you posted a link to a kWh calculator. What I find very interesting is comparing the kWh meter that we purchased to use with our generator with our actual fuel usage.

We pay approximately $1.04 per therm for natural gas. A therm of natural gas has the same amount of energy as 29.3 kWh. If we had a generator which operated with 100% efficiency it would cost us 3.55 cents a kilowatt hour to produce electricity using natural gas.

A gallon of gas has the same amount of energy as 32.78 kWh of electricity. We pay approximately $2.50 for a gallon of gasoline so if we had that generator that operated at 100% efficiency it would cost us 7.6 cents per kWh to produce electricity using gasoline.

In real life the generator generally uses approximately 5 gallons of gasoline to produce 25 kWh of electricity. So that works out to $12.50 for 25 kWh which is 50 cents per kWh. If we are using natural gas 5 therms produces approximately 24 kWh of electricity. So that comes out to $5.20 for 24 kWh which comes to approximately 22 cents per kWh. So you can see that our little generators are using most of their fuel to produce waste heat.

Natural gas is far cheaper for the amount of energy you are buying than gasoline. Utilities in California can produce electricity for 6.1 cents per kWh using natural gas because large power plants are far more efficient than small generators.

But 50 cents per kWh using gasoline as compared to 22 cents per kWh using natural gas seems much more reasonable and it doesn't feel like it is hitting you in the wallet nearly as hard as when you are making multiple trips to the gasoline station. When we are using our generator during frequent power outages we tend to reduce our electric consumption by a considerable amount by having only what we are using turned on so it actually affects our power bill very little when we have a couple days with the electric power out.

Your numbers sound about right.

Agree there are trade offs all over the place.

IMHO one leg of a successful Trump admin will be to steadily collapse cost structures across every energy type.

Trump says he wants energy dominance and a high growth rate. Ever lower energy costs are one of the ways you get there.