You do realize that San Antonio is listed as one of the fastest growing cities in America don’t you? You cannot conserve your way to more energy, you need to actually produce it.

Did you read the Express-News’ Anton Caputo’s article about the cost of Nuclear energy?

The story you ran on 4/29/09 “Nuke Plant may cost 22 Billion”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/Nuke_plan_may_cost_22_billion.html

The chart that was captioned “CPS Energy believes it is the most cost-effective way to generate energy” that stated that nuclear is 8 cents and wind is 12.5 cents and solar 21 cents shows how much cheaper nuclear is than either wind or solar.

So you believe that conserving energy is cheaper than nuclear?

I notice how you have had two opportunities to show the cost of alternatives and you insist on repeating how conserving is how CPS will find the energy for future consumers.

No matter how much CPS will be able to conserve it will never be able to keep up with demand.

I also have noticed how you keep using conserving and saving energy without giving even one concrete example. Why is that?

It is actually quite simple economics. If conserving and saving were cheaper and attainable don’t you think it would have been done by now?

Due to the word limit, I couldn’t get into CPS’s public statement (Vicki Vaughan’s July 1 article) that they plan on selling half their share of the nuke on the wholesale market. Keep in mind that up until now, CPS has been claiming they will need all that power to meet demand. That’s no longer true. Also, keep in mind the diminishing demand forecast when comparing different resources to meet demand. Efficiency and renewable energy are more easily scalable than large central power plants, and therefore are better resource options.

Now, to your point on alternatives that I mentioned, I mentioned energy efficiency and renewable energy. I did not mention solar and wind specifically, although those are two types of renewable resources that CPS can and does use.

In regard to efficiency, if you want to use statewide averages, you can look at the recent PUC report on energy efficiency in Texas (commonly known as “The Itron Report”) that put the cost of energy efficiency at 1-4 cents/kWh. If you want a large municipal example you can look at Austin, which says it pays about $330/kW on efficiency and demand-side management. Both these figures are lower than any alternative. It’s commonly accepted that efficiency is the cheapest resource a utility can invest in.

San Antonio estimates they’ll spend $850 million to save 771 MW by 2020. That equates to around $1100/kW. That seems extremely high given what other utilities pay for efficiency, so it’ll be interesting to see how they run their programs. But even with that large estimate, it’s still lower than the $4800/kW they estimate for new nuclear.

Renewable energy encompasses many different resources and technologies of varying costs-almost all of which are cheaper than nuclear. You can find market prices for different renewable energy resources in many different reports, you can look at PPA’s for wind for CPS or Austin Energy. I encourage you to read Cooper’s report which covers these differences between nuclear and its alternatives, as well as the independent analyses by Johnson and Makhijani.

Since you didn’t contend the point of the article, I’ll take it that you acknowledge that new nuclear plants are incredibly expensive.

Thanks again, for reading.

-Matt

You article is just another attempt to dodge the facts that solar/wind are not and will not be in the near future be able to meet our future energy needs.

The main reason you most likely do not give costs is that these cannot be quantified.

Please give your readers even one example of a large city (SA is #7) that uses your vision for their energy needs.