Regarding Elon Musk, I think it is irrelevant if you get more energy out of solar panels vs. biofuels as that is simply the wrong question because you’re getting two very different types of energy out of each. Solar produces electric power which needs to be moved across a large capital intensive grid and also has to have supply and demand balance in realtime, solar has problems producing power when it is needed. Biofuels are high density portable energy sources that work with a trillion dollar base of invested infrastructure.
The portability/infrastructure view can be seen by a market based approach.
One MMBTU of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub, sells for $3.50
A Barrel of Brent oil sells for $110 a barrel
6 mmbtu’s of Natural gas has the same energy content of a barrel of Brent, or you could buy the energy content of a barrel of oil for $21 with natural gas. The FORM that a unit of energy comes in matters a lot.
Regarding Elon Musk’s claim on nuclear power plants I think there must be an assumption he’s made that I’m not aware of. On it’s face I don’t believe this is true, there likely is an important assumption missing like perhaps every single inch of the site is covered. Also even if the absolute outputs of energy are the same because solar isn’t going to always deliver a steady planed amount of power output, peaker power plants are going to be needed when days are shady etc. changing the economics.
The FORM of energy matters, Nuclear power plants run for months at full capacity and when they need to be out of service that is planned ahead of time to occur during times of the year when demand is lower. My job at Enron was to know everything about every Nuclear power plant in the country because there was a lot of money to be made in predicting if one wouldn’t be able to produce.
The compressed air storage investment that PG recently made is all about the timing and form of energy, being able to shift those has a LOT of economics value.
PG
The portability/infrastructure view can be seen by a market based approach. One MMBTU of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub, sells for $3.50 A Barrel of Brent oil sells for $110 a barrel 6 mmbtu’s of Natural gas has the same energy content of a barrel of Brent, or you could buy the energy content of a barrel of oil for $21 with natural gas. The FORM that a unit of energy comes in matters a lot.
Regarding Elon Musk’s claim on nuclear power plants I think there must be an assumption he’s made that I’m not aware of. On it’s face I don’t believe this is true, there likely is an important assumption missing like perhaps every single inch of the site is covered. Also even if the absolute outputs of energy are the same because solar isn’t going to always deliver a steady planed amount of power output, peaker power plants are going to be needed when days are shady etc. changing the economics. The FORM of energy matters, Nuclear power plants run for months at full capacity and when they need to be out of service that is planned ahead of time to occur during times of the year when demand is lower. My job at Enron was to know everything about every Nuclear power plant in the country because there was a lot of money to be made in predicting if one wouldn’t be able to produce.
The compressed air storage investment that PG recently made is all about the timing and form of energy, being able to shift those has a LOT of economics value. PG