Microwaving Your Free Lunch

If you’re one of those folks who thinks renewables are too expensive to be a reality here are two quick headlines to blow your mind (you might want to put down that Hot Pocket you’re about to bite into):

Solar Power May Already Rival Coal  

Wind Power’s Best Projects Rival Costs of New Coal-Fired Plants  

It turns out that even when the sun and wind are doing all of the work you have to pay for power – I guess my econ professors were right there really isn’t any free lunch. It also turns out that the renewable energy lunch is getting cheaper.

Let’s take a moment and talk about how much power – and money – it takes to heat that Hot Pocket.

The package says it takes 3 minutes and 15 seconds to cook a Hot Pocket in an 1100 Watt microwave oven. If you eat these things five days a week 46 weeks a year, then your microwave is running for 12.3 hours. That translates into 13.5 kWh on your electric bill.

Rocky Mountain Power wants to raise the rates we pay for power in the coming years. How much they raise our rates depends in part on which energy sources they turn to in the coming years. This little graph shows the cost of nuking your Hot Pockets with electricity from different energy sources.

The average American household does a lot more than just microwave a Hot Pocket every day: Each gets billed for an average of 10,656 kWh annually. When we were talking about just cooking Hot Pockets the stakes were low. Only about a dollar per year separated the options. But, for lighting and heating for a whole household, the stakes rise to hundreds of dollars.

These numbers are conservative but tell the same story as do those headlines: Energy efficiency, wind, and geothermal are all increasingly competitive with coal and natural gas, while nuclear is the most expensive option. This is important whether you’re cooking lunch -- or making state energy policy decisions.

Check back next week for a discussion of the current state of research on energy pricing, this time with no Hotpockets.