Price Per Watt Solar Vs Coal

Coal while certainly cheaper than other fuel sources like fuel cells or biomass costs 21 mwh for fuel and 12 for operations and maintenance totaling 33 per mwh 4x the price of solar.

Price per watt solar vs coal.

However after construction is completed solar costs just 8 per megawatt hour for operations and maintenance and of course solar has no fuel costs. So in 2018 utility solar was cheaper than coal and advanced nuclear. Incredibly over an eight year span from 2006 to 2014 worldwide average solar panel module prices have dropped over 75 from 3 25 per watt to about 72 per watt. A study led by the former head of the harvard medical school found that coal cost the us 500 billion per year in extra health and environmental costs approximately 9 kwh 90 mwh to 27.

At a glance this seems like a disadvantage since you need over four watts of solar generation to displace one watt of coal power. Until the past decade no alternative energy resource came close to rivaling that price. The most recent projections and estimates for different types of power plants are in levelized cost and levelized avoided cost of new generation resources in the annual energy outlook 2020 which includes estimated costs in dollars per megawatthour mwh based on a 30 year cost recovery period for various types of power plants that start. 89 90 this is seen as evidence supporting swanson s law which states that solar cell prices fall 20 for every doubling of cumulative shipments.

The best way to compare solar energy and fossil fuels without subsidies is to examine global energy prices. Photovoltaic prices have fallen from 76 67 per watt in 1977 to nearly 0 102 per watt in october 2019 for multi crystalline silicon solar cells and module price to 0 21 per watt. Prices per megawatt hour from electricity for coal fired power plants range from a low of 60 to a high of 143 according to lazard a financial advisory firm that publishes annual estimates of. Over the last decade wind energy prices have fallen 70 and solar photovoltaics have fallen 89 on average according to.

However if you compare the kilowatt hour price a new solar array will generally beat a new coal fired power station. Selected historical mean unsubsidized lcoe values 2009 2019. Of course it s all about location. At an installed price of 1 25 per watt per the above analysis the cost of pv solar is always cheaper than coal.

Global coal prices have historically averaged 0 06 cents per kilowatt hour kwh.