College Research

Simultaneous with unreliability, switching over to renewable energy will be an expensive solution. To produce energy from the wind, there needs to be wind turbines built, which takes up a huge amount of land. Benjamin Zycher reported that to generate a thousand megawatts (MW), a wind farm would take up 48 thousand to 64 thousand acres and have a capacity factor, which is the real amount of energy put out versus the amount it could in theory put out, of 35 percent; meanwhile, traditional coal would take up 10 to 15 acres to produce the same amount and have a capacity factor of 85 to 90 percent (par. 5). The amount of land that would need to be bought for wind farms is incredibly more than coal, for less of a reward. Nevertheless, supporters of wind energy will probably argue that in the long run, wind power is still more affordable. Windustry, a non-profit organization, state that while common sources of power that companies need to pay for shipping and digging of fuel, wind energy produces power right at the source, which is free (par. 7). That should mean paying for wind energy would be cheaper than coal but this would be wrong. As Ben Lieberman et al. stated, “The electric bill for a typical family of four would be $189 per month if it was powered entirely by coal, but it would rise to $340 per month if it was supplied entirely by onshore wind power” (par. 32). Therefore, many families will have to pay double in just electricity if wind takes the place of coal. Even though there is no cost to ship fuel to wind turbines with wind power, there are many factors that contribute to the high expense of wind energy.

Similar to wind energy, solar energy is also very expensive. Like wind power, there is a lot of land needed to be bought but not as high as wind. Zycher explained that to be able to produce a power plant on solar energy, the maximum power generated by the plant would be 50 to a 100 megawatts, which would take up 1250 acres of land (par. 6). Consequently, it would take 2500 acres to produce the same 1000 megawatts that wind and coal produces. With the amount of land needed to produce power with solar energy being less than wind, activist would say the total cost is at a declining path. Dave Levitan, a journalist in Philadelphia, wrote on how there is a“rapidly declining cost and increasing efficiency of photovoltaic and other solar technologies” (par. 7).  Therefore, the price tag on solar energy is lowering as time goes by. Even if the price is rapidly decreasing, the cost to produce power with any kind of apparatus is still high. Lieberman et al. also wrote how the Energy Information Administration put the price of one megawatt for two kinds of ways to produce solar power at $396.10 or $256.60; this is higher than coal, onshore wind, and offshore wind that are priced at $78.10, $149.30 and $191.10 respectively (par. 20). Even with a lower amount of land that needs to be bought, solar power is still highly expensive to produce, even more than wind. However, solar and wind power are not the only source of power that comes with an extremely high cost to produce.

Just like wind and solar power, nuclear power comes with a high price tag. A big problem with nuclear power is the amount of money it takes to build nuclear power plants. Joseph Romm, a climate expert and physicist, claimed how from the years of 2000 to 2007, the price to build a plant has gone up to 185 percent; therefore, “a nuclear power plant that would have cost $4 billion to build in 2000 would have cost more than $11 billion to build last October [2007]” (par. 10). At this rate, the cost of construction of nuclear plants will keep increasing to massive amounts. However, pro-nuclear activist would argue that nuclear power is still affordable. Articles written by activists, compiled together by Opposing Viewpoints in Context, state that because nuclear energy can compete with today’s coal fuel with production cost, in the future, nuclear energy will be the cheapest way to make energy and will take carbon out of productions (Levitan par. 5; McInnes par. 16). As much as the activists want to push the vision of cheap nuclear power, as of now, this will not be the case. Just as there are activists saying the future holds promise for nuclear energy, there are others that would disagree. Romm also stated that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, performed a study in 2003 where they found out that, because of numerous problems, nuclear energy’s advantages are restricted, and the only future it has is a highly expensive one (par. 5). Even a highly honored school like MIT does not have interest in nuclear power because of the high expense of making nuclear energy an alternative energy source. With technology improving everyday, an energy option like nuclear will still be too expensive to make nuclear power the main source of power a reality. Renewable energies while being low cost is good in theory, but the high price that a comes with each renewable energy makes them impractical to be used.