Gullible Reporting By New York Times On the Cost of Solar Electricity Versus Nuclear Electricity
A few days ago, a retired economics professor named John Blackburn and a student named Sam Cunningham who is seeking a Masters of Environmental Management published a paper commissioned by NC Warn, an organization that, in its own words, is “tackling the accelerating crisis posed by climate change — along with the various risks of nuclear power — by watch-dogging utility practices and working for a swift North Carolina transition to energy efficiency and clean power generation.”
The paper is seductively titled Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy. The paper’s cover has a dramatic and colorful graph that shows ever increasing costs for nuclear and ever decreasing costs for solar. The lines cross in 2010. (I will explain my use of the word “seductive”.)
For their nuclear power cost projections, the professor emeritus and his grad student relied on a 2009 cost projection paper written by a lone researcher named Mark Cooper, whose current employment is described as “Senior Research Fellow for Economic Analysis” for the Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment. His brief biography states that he has a “PhD from Yale” but it does not specify his field of study. It indicates he is an “activist/advocate” with a rather wide range of interest areas including telecommunications regulations and energy consumer issues.
Update: (Posted August 4, 2010 at 0448) Mark Cooper’s CV is available on-line as part of a testimony that he provided on June 5, 2006 on behalf of Consumer Federation Of America, Consumers Union, Free Press, AND USPIRG in the case of a then proposed merger between BellSouth and AT&T. Cooper’s CV follows page 77 of the posted testimony. On page one of that CV, Cooper’s education is listed as Yale University, Ph.D., 1979, Sociology; University of Maryland, M.A., 1973, Sociology; City College of New York, B.A., 1968, English. His PhD dissertation about Egypt formed the basis for a book titled The Transformation of Egypt. End Update.
The paper ignores all other cost projections for nuclear. Some of the previous work on this topic that the professor and his graduate student ignored includes the following:
- A 2003 study conducted by a multidisciplinary team at MIT titled The Future of Nuclear Power which was updated with new data in 2009.
- A 2005 report by the World Nuclear Association titled The New Economics of Nuclear Power
- A 2010 OECD study titled Projected Costs of Generating Electricity: 2010 Edition
For the cost of solar electricity, Blackburn and Cunningham relied on reported offers of “commercial scale” solar electricity at a certain price to the grid supplier – without noting that those offers are on a strictly “when available” basis that is also take or pay.
Here is an analogy – if you happen to grow tomatoes in your yard, imagine going to your local grocery store and demanding that the grocer pay you the same price that he charges at retail. The grocer must take all of the tomatoes that your garden produces, but you make no promises about how many you will bring each day. When you want to eat tomatoes at home, but your garden has not produced any, you expect to be able to walk into the store and purchase all of the tomatoes that you need at the same price that you sold them for. (Actually, this is not a very good analogy, because on page 11 of their paper, Blackburn and Cunningham admit that certain solar electricity suppliers will actually be paid a “subsidized” rate of 19 cents per kilowatt hour, which is almost two times the residential retail price in North Carolina of 10.5 cents per kilowatt hour.)
In addition to failing to mention the terms and conditions under which electricity is being offered, Blackburn and Cunningham bury a few “minor” details about solar electricity real costs in an appendix. As they admit in a section that few people will read, the price that some installers are talking about charging utilities is the “net” price – after they receive and bank all currently offered payments from other taxpayers and after they have obtained taxpayer subsidized 25 year amortization, tax free loans. In North Carolina today, a homeowner who purchases a solar energy system receives a 30% cash grant from the federal government and a 35% cash grant from the state government.
Using the example provided in the paper, those cash payments turn a 3 KWe (max capacity), $18,000 system that produces electricity at 35 cents per kilowatt hour (if financed at 6% interest for 25 years) into a system costing the homeowner just $8,190 and producing electricity for a total of 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour – when the sun is shining. Of course, that means that the homeowner has received a grant of $9,810 from his or her neighbors, some of whom may not own a home (renters) or even own a roof (condo and apartment dwellers). Blackburn and Cunningham admit that they did not include energy storage costs of any kind (pg 11).
I promised at the top of this blog that I would explain my use of the word “seductive” and I guess I should also explain the word “gullible” that I used in the post title. Solar electricity has a warm and fuzzy reputation. Everyone would love it if we could capture all of the energy that we needed from the sun with little initial expense. We would love it if solar panels really did last for 25 years, even though many fail much earlier than that, especially if they are blown away by the kinds of storms that occasionally occur in a place like North Carolina. Therefore, an announcement by a seemingly credible source like a “professor” that solar electricity has actually become cheaper than nuclear might be cause for celebration and attention from major news sources. That is the seductive part.
The gullible part is that a normally credible news source, the New York Times, apparently did not bother to more fully investigate the credibility of the “study” to find out that it is just a paper that was commissioned by an organization that is dedicated to a well publicized agenda. On July 26, 2010, on the front page of the New York Times business section, there was a Special Report: Energy titled Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage written by Diana S. Powers whose conclusions about electricity cost comparisons between nuclear and solar were entirely based on the Blackburn and Cunningham paper and its sources. The writer did not check on the academic credentials of the paper’s authors, check to see if it had been peer reviewed, or question whether or not it was backed up by independent work by anyone else. She quite possibly did not even read the entire paper to understand the calculations used to draw the pretty graph. The editor allotted a good deal of valuable space for this poorly researched work.
So far, it does not look like many other major media sources have picked up the story. I certainly hope that they take a much harder look at reality before they do, and address some of the glaring weaknesses and established agendas that are the real reasons that the paper was written and widely spread through certain portions of the blogosphere.
Additional Reading
Greentech Media – 2011: The Return of the Solar Shakeout (Warning: This is a lengthy, complex article detailing the solar industry’s deep financial dependence on subsidies and feed in tariffs.)
Update: (July 30, 2010 0158). Fast Company article dated July 29, 2010 – Is Solar Power Now Cheaper Than Nuclear Energy?. It looks like Ariel Schwartz has also been gullible or guilty of sloppy reporting. The sloppiness shows up in the second sentence when she describes an NC Warn sponsored document written by a RETIRED professor from Duke University and a student working on his masters degree in the following manner: “The analysis, which comes from a Duke University report entitled Solar and Nuclear Costs: The Historic Crossover, claims that, “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants” in North Carolina.” If I represented Duke University, I would be getting on the phone to ask the publication to print a correction that clarified the source of the document. If I published Fast Company, I would direct my editors and reporters to be a bit more careful with fact checking.
Update: (August 3, 2010 1932). The New York Times has added the following note to the Diane Powers article titled Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage:
Editors’ Note: August 3, 2010
An article published July 27 in an Energy Special Report analyzed the costs of nuclear energy production. It quoted a study that found that electricity from solar photovoltaic systems could now be produced less expensively than electricity from new nuclear power plants.In raising several questions about this issue and the economics of nuclear power, the article failed to point out, as it should have, that the study was prepared for an environmental advocacy group, which, according to its Web site, is committed to ‘‘tackling the accelerating crisis posed by climate change — along with the various risks of nuclear power.’’ The article also failed to take account of other studies that have come to contrasting conclusions, or to include in the mix of authorities quoted any who elaborated on differing analyses of the economics of energy production.
Although the article did quote extensively from the Web site of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, representatives of the institute were not given an opportunity to respond to the claims of the study. This further contributed to an imbalance in the presentation of this issue.
Though this note did not mention the importance of federal and state direct subsidy payments and it is debatable whether or not there were “extensive” quotes from the NEI web site, it is reassuring to see that the editors were concerned enough about the sources used to print that comment. If anyone has access to the paper edition of the Times, please let me know if there were any retractions or corrections printed there.
I lost a lot of my respect for a once-great newspaper, the New York Times, during the runup to the Iraq War. It’s a mixed bag these days, with very good reporting and some very sloppy reporting.
Perhaps the author of the report should review “Outlook for Energy – A view to 2030” specifically, page 24.
Read my comments on your post “Incredibly misleading headline from the European Wind Energy …” regarding how the power provided from generation sources is really measured by the utilities. In essence, I will sell the retailer my tomatoes at retail price, but when I need tomatoes I get to buy them at wholesale price! The contracted price for electricity to many of our large industries is around 3 cents per Kwh. So, the guy runs his control systems on $0.03 /Kwh (why would he run it on electricity he can “legally” sell for $0.25 when he can use $0.03???) and sells his produced electricity at $0.25, AND collects $0.19 subsidy from the government. (Previous numbers are at least a year old and will be different in your area.) That is why they are in the business.
I believe they spell that S C A M
Thanks for the careful deconstruction of this deceptive anti-nuclear advocacy document. I read it and found it lacking in basic honesty, which would have required the authors to disclose, up front, that the basic concept is that “if someone else pays most of the cost something, then it costa me much than it would have.” That this report was picked up and effectively repeated and expanded in the NY Times is probably a function of the anti-nuclear perspective of the article’s author, who seems to be using her position to advance an agenda, coupled with a fairly well developed plan of orchestrated disinformation from anti-nuclear advocates.
The NY Times story reads like an anti-nuclear “hatchet job,” with the fig leaf of appearance-of-objectivity added by quoting a representative of the nuclear industry. Conducting an analysis to determine whether claims of anti-nuclear advocates is correct is beyond either the capability or interest of most reporters, and an anti-nuclear reporter like this one will likely cite that as beyond her job description if she is confronted.
The nuclear industry spokespeople will not engage the fact issues and weaknesses of renewable energy in response to these articles because they cannot risk being seen as “anti-renewable.” That leaves it up to the grassroots nuclear advocates to try to correct mis-statements. As against the developed network of foundation-supported anti-nuclear advocacy, our resources are few.
However, it is important to try.
Since simply “preaching to the choir” (your blog readers) is not a very productive use of mind power, if productivity is gauged by potential to influence thinking, I hope you rework your thoughtful piece into a letter to the NY Times, and the author of the article. In doing so I would urge you to to make any challenge to the credentials of the individuals involved a minor element of the challenge. The key issues are not their anti-nuclear resum? but that they generate misleading analyses based on cherry-picked sources, and they and bury reference to key factors in parts of the document that few will read. I believe they do this soled to establish “plausible deniability” when their objectivity is challenged. Best to challenge the dishonesty, the cherry-picking, misrepresentation itself.
There is value in keeping to the high road when engaging in forums where we may be able to reach people who are uncertain, and those are the people we want to engage. The value of debating with anti-nuclear advocates and anti-nuclear stories, lies not in changing the minds of the reflexive opponents of nuclear energy. Those minds seem absurdly closed and narrow to me, and, frankly, aren’t worth the effort. The value comes from the opportunity to articulate important truths about energy options to others in the audience.
In fact, we should all be writing to the NY Times about this hatchet piece and sharing our letters with each other. Maybe we could all publish our letters somewhere, as they are unlikely to be published by the NY Times. Your blog?
forgot to edit my comment through.
My quote
if someone else pays most of the cost something, then it costa me much than it would have.
Should have read:
if someone else pays most of the cost something, then it costs me much less than it would have without the subsidy.
As a follow-up to Rich’s comment, you can find the report he references at
http://exxonmobil.vc/Corporate/files/news_pub_eo_2009.pdf
It is a 6.4 MW pdf file.
@Frank – I would certainly publish well written letters here.
I acknowledge your tactical advice for taking the high road and not questioning credentials. However, I am tired of being nice and entering into a ring with nasty fighters with me following the rules and them feeling free to lie through their teeth. I have not questioned whether or not they are qualified to write in the sense of asking that they be silenced; I am merely pointing out their education, and work record along with using their own words to describe their agenda. If that causes uncommitted readers to think a little harder, or if it happens to feel like an insult to the authors, so be it. This is an open forum and they are free to come and correct the record. Unlike many of the blogs run by anti’s, I allow nearly all comments to be immediately visible for discussion.
There are only a few people who have earned a ban from commenting here by constantly trying to move the discussion to their own pet discussions that have little to nothing to do with energy technology, policy and politics.
I am a trained fighter and technologist. If a lawyer wants to engage in an implied character assassination of an entire profession by implying that we are too dumb to do a reasonable cost benefit analysis of energy choices, he deserves to be taken down – intellectually, of course.
The tomato analogy is still too positive. The shop could put some of the tomatos in the frige and store them for some time. It’s more like a pizza restaurant having to buy fresh and steaming pizza from an “intermittent” bakery at retail price, whenever the intermittent source happens to deliver it. Any surplus of pizza is blamed on the restaurant, since it is so “inflexible” to have cooks employed permanently and the pizza oven fired up all the time.
Basically there can only be two outcomes for the consumer: either much higher cost for permanent availability (full capacity backup generator, ready at all times, fully staffed etc., or a battery/storage system) OR less cost but intermittent availability “passed on” to the consumer under the name “demand response”.
The NY Times has long-since lost its credibility, and much of its readership, by either employing starkly biased ‘news reporters’ (e.g. Blair) or printing poorly researched articles (e.g. Bob Herbert’s recent hatchet job on nuclear power). The advertisers recognize the demise of this paper and are making a market-driven choice to invest elsewhere.
normally credible news source, the New York Times
ROFLOL! About the only thing you can learn from reading the NYT is the agenda of ignorant journalists. If you think the NYT is a credible news source your questioning attitude is not as well developed as you think.
I am a trained fighter..
So Rod how does one handle smoke emitting diodes? If you read the guarantee for the devices to convert DC to AC you will find that they are only covered for 5 years. It costs about $5000 to replace one for a 3 kwe system.
I am sure that Rod knows that an electrical fire can not be put out until the circuit is de-energized. How do de-energize PV panels during the day? What about fires caused by downed power lines?
While every nuke plant and navy ship has a well trained fire brigade, how many how owners are knowledgeable enough on the PV generating system to assist the fire department when they arrive?
This is not a trivial problem either. I have read about more than 50 PV induced home fires. I have only antidotal evidence about component failure.
The bottom line is that the PV system will stop making electricity when there is a $5000 repair to produce $2000 in electricity. Not many will make it to 25 years.
As a newspaper reporter for more than a decade, I can tell you this article showed substantial bias in sourcing. Anti-nuclear sources got most of the space, while a token pro-nuclear representative wasn’t allowed to address the specific issues against nuclear raised in the story. The story also showed an appalling lack of understanding about baseload power, reliability issues, intermittency and the far greater amounts of steel, concrete, replacement and land area (energy inputs) which are needed for intermittent sources. Either the reporter was ignorant of these, or chose not to include them. Saying the article was focused on the study alone would be a copout – the story sought to weave a broader indictment of nuclear power, and should therefore consider broader issues. Like most Americans, I’m an all-of-the-abover. We need clean baseload sources like nuclear and intermittent sources like wind and solar and I support appropriate subsidies for all of them. We also need competent journalism that discloses the motives of sources, considers unmentioned influences and includes diverse voices.
I at least credit this story with having no anonymous sources. To maintain its mystique, I don’t think the NYT could issue a weather report without quoting a high-ranking government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying today will be sunny and warm. Anonymous sources dominate the tabloid press and large coastal media, but that’s another story.
There is another glaring omission in the referenced NC-Warn report.
Look at it this way. How many of you saw your electric rate go up over the last year or so even though the industrial use of electricity, and yours, has gone down? Why did the cost of electricity go up if the use (demand) went down? Even though the utility I retired from gave no pay raise for the last two years, their rates went up! The problem is they still have the same number of power plants capable of producing the same amount of power that they are now not selling. To meet expenses they have to raise the price of the electricity that they sell.
Now put a solar collector on every home/business roof. These solar collectors can only make electricity when there is Sun. no sun – no electricity. All public utilities are required by state and federal regulations to be able to produce, at any given time, 10% more than the projected peak demand for that day. That is why power plant outages are in the spring and fall, lower demand gives them the ability to not have a plant operating. If everyone in your area has a solar collector the utility will still need to provide this peak projected load capability AND they will need to factor in the fact that the sun may not shine for several days making all of those solar panels useless. They will base the solar outage period based upon historical weather data and obtain concurrence from the local public utility commission. That means that your electric bill will reflect the fact that you are paying for a power station that is not producing any power, but is fully staffed and ready to produce power.
Of course you can eliminate paying for “standby” unused power plants by getting the PUC to remove this requirement and significantly reduce your power bill. Probably even cut the price in half, but, then where will you get electricity when there are several days of no sunshine and the local utility has shuttered that old coal plant (no longer required by regulations) to save “Carbon Credits”? The gasoline powered generator you bought at Lowes/Home Depot?
These same problems apply to wind.
I work in the nuclear industry and also an “all-of-the-abover” assuming it meets standards for safety and environmental impact. Having a reliable and affordable electricity supply is important to preclude bad things from happening.
I also agree that is good to document sources with something other than anonymous. Journalists love to report on “secrets” but how secret is it if a reader like me can find the ?ecret report?in less than a minute? After reading the source materials, I have to wonder if the part of the brain that writes is different than the part that reads. Some reporters are too lazy to read past the first paragraph. Other reporters make the extra effort to take information out of context. I do not know what they call in journalism school, but in public schools it is call lying.
To be fair, the reading public has some responsibility that has been made a whole lot easier with the internet. In my mind, reporting is about the five w’s. If the reader wants to know more, dig deeper. In this case Rod has provided enough links to do just that.
The preposterous Warn article references ‘publically” available Nuclear plant “cost” data that is neither accurate or representative of what plants will cost. The fact is that plants in progress are still refining their contratcs and costs to get them into the lowest range possible with fair risk assumption by owner and EPC contractors. Their table showing nuclear costs is misleading, in that it includes total cost including “owner costs” which in some projects includes-requies huge transmission buildouts. Additionally their replacement assumptions are generically wrong because ‘renewables” will not be applicable to all areas that are now planning baseload nuclear like Florida, southeastern states , and mid atlantic!
It is interestin to watch the “Interventionista’s” play their cards, relying on a relic like Cooper in Vermont for supposed “facts” on something he has no “primary experience” in or knowledge of….
Myth Lore and Legend….
I thought the Times motto was “All The News That’s Fit To Print”, not “One Sided Opinions from Questionable Sources Passed Off As News And Printed”.
Anyone who doesn’t discuss the cost of intermittency – and inherent unreliability (and yes, it does have a cost) lacks credibility in comparing wind and solar to nuclear.
Does the author of the report account for having to store nuclear waste material for thousands of years?
This cost is already included in the present cost of electricity – twice. Once to pay for Yucca MT., which they can’t use and again to pay for the temporary storage they need because they can’t use Yucca. His data is worthless. My utility sells electricity for $0.03/Kwh to several large industral firms (multi megawatts, about 1/2 the nuclear power plant output) and is not losing money.
You don’t have bury used fuel, or watch it for thousands of years. You can reduce – use Generation III+ reactors, very fuel efficient – reuse – use spent fuel directly in a DUPIC cycle through a CANDU – and recycle – using advanced reprocessing systems – separating out the various waste components.
The nasty stuff only has a short lifetime, probably could be reduced using accelerator driven systems powered by the extraordinary quantity of clean energy produced by a fission reactor.
The ideal green solution.
I had almost given up on you, Kit, but then you come along with a gem like this. Modern digital inverters do have a limited lifetime – unless you’re willing to risk doing some DIY repairs on them – hardly advisable. The ones that are capable of providing a reasonably modern existence are very expensive and the residential sized ones aren’t aren’t exactly “utility grade” or “commercial grade” – ABS plastic housing, cutesy backlit LCD display, ventilation ports easily blockable by dust or something covering them – all in all – a system that can easily fail if exposed to grid disturbances or a hostile environment.
These snazzy home inverters often command up to several power resources. For instance, a large battery bank, a generator, a grid tie, and the photovoltaic array. They do it all digitally. The whole problem with distributed generation that has always worried me – a nightmare in the back of my head – is what if systems fail – or for some reason they aren’t on in the first place. Any grid-tied system that doesn’t provide guaranteed isolation from the grid in the event of grid failure is a public menace capable of killing linesmen – AND slowing the speed of restoration down – in general – as linesmen can’t be sure that a line is de-energized. Some of these inverters allow automatic grid connection and disconnection upon digital command. Eventually, one of these digital systems is going to fail, the distributed system is going to stay connected to the grid, and a linesman is going to get injured or killed.
Rod, have you considered sending your response to the ombudsman at the NY Times and also as a letter to the editor? Worth doing. Cite your credentials when you submit. The Times will never print a retraction about any of the wrong things it publishes about nuclear power, but in the future the article editors might ask a bit more of their reporters in terms of checking the backgrounds of their sources.
Gwyneth – those are good ideas. I think I’ll try and see what happens.
That’s one POWERFUL file!
Does this include the cost of disaster clean up. Lets be real here, there have been 3 nuclear accidents in the recent years with very high loss associated. Realistically not only should that be included in the figures but the cost of losing that land and life for generations to come as nuclear waste can when things go wrong. This study is before Fukushima Japan but just look to their cost to get a more realistic view of the true cost of a nuclear future. Life is precious and too costly a price to pay, people, animal, land and sea.