a canny carbon calculation, page-2

Thanks Rotinek - this article also piqued my interest, in particular the paragraphs:

"It is obvious that no-one with any sense is going to build new coal-fired baseload capacity, which means that any new baseload will almost inevitably be a combined-cycle gas plant. Unfortunately, according to Johnson, a big combined cycle gas plant would take up to about five years to build.

Moreover, it is unlikely that such a plant would be built in the absence of a carbon price and much higher electricity prices, as much as double the current price."

Doubling the current retail electricity price would certainly be very good news for CFU. It got me thinking about how much it might cost to build a combined cycle gas plant. Clearly they are not cheap.

A back of the envelope calculation to install 1,000 megawatts of capacity using the CFU Blugens gave me a figure of AU$5 billion (500,000 Bluegens @ AU$10,000 per unit). So does anyone have any idea how much it would cost to construct and commission a 1,000MW combined cycle gas plant? Would it be close to $5 billion? I confess I have no idea, but I certainly know which of the two options would be more efficient at producing electricity.

An opportunity? Maybe. How quickly could we fill an order for 500,000 units?

And for a company like AGL, how much more profit would they make selling more gas to a CCG plant to generate the 1,000MW that the Bluegens could produce using less gas? Perhaps there is a conflict of interest there.