Cost Works Against Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources in Time of Recession New York Times, by Matthew L. Wald, March 29, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/business/energy-environment/29renew.html At Black & Veatch, a company based in Overland Park, Kan., that has been involved in the construction of coal, gas and wind plants, analysts recently compared the costs per kilowatt-hour of different energy sources for the big energy competitors. A kilowatt-hour is the unit of energy that the utilities use to bill homeowners, with the current retail cost averaging around 11 cents. A modern coal plant of conventional design, without technology to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the air, produces at about 7.8 cents a kilowatt-hour; a high-efficiency natural gas plant, 10.6 cents; and a new nuclear reactor, 10.8 cents. A wind plant in a favorable location would cost 9.9 cents per kilowatt hour. But if a utility relied on a great many wind machines, it would need to back them up with conventional generators in places where demand tends to peak on hot summer days with no breeze. That pushes the price up to just over 12 cents, making it more than 50 percent more expensive than a kilowatt-hour for coal.