An emerging technology promises to drastically lower power-plant carbon emissions.
The low costs of renewable energy that have enabled the world to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the past decade are continuing to fall, which is welcome news for the effort to address climate change. And now along comes hydrogen, a crucial new energy technology, to provide fresh reason to be optimistic about progress ahead.
For the first time this year, Lazard is including hydrogen in its annual analysis of the so-called levelized cost of energy — measurements of how various renewable energy technologies compare with conventional fossil-fuel generation. Over the 12 years we’ve been conducting these studies, costs per megawatt hour for newly built renewable energy technologies have declined substantially, and this past year has been no different. From 2009 to 2019, the cost of utility-scale solar energy fell 89%, and over the past year it has dropped another 9%. Onshore wind power fell 2% over the past year, after dropping 70% over the previous decade.
These declines are so substantial that, even without federal subsidies, solar and wind power are now less expensive than coal, nuclear and combined-cycle gas technologies. If a financial cost were attached to carbon emissions from the fossil fuels, the differentials would be even larger. Read More…
