While Australia continues to debate whether nuclear is a viable medium-term option in comparison to renewable energy, Europe has invested heavily in a new kind of power plant – hybrid plants that combine wind, solar, hydropower and energy storage systems.
Already, a project in Poland is building a combination of a 365-megawatt (MW) photovoltaic (PV or solar power) system, a 264 MW wind farm system and a 168 MW battery system to produce green hydrogen.
Similar systems are being built in Spain, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Australia, Denmark, and the US to name a few countries, with about 469 hybrid plants operating in the US alone as of 2023.
Imploding costs and falling energy prices
The true success story for renewable energy has been the startlingly swift reduction in prices for renewable energy components.
The falling costs of solar, now 85% cheaper than 15 years ago, have been well documented, but the cost of battery storage has also fallen a whopping 90% in the same period.
A study by Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems outlined the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for German solar farms is between 4.1 and 6.9 eurocents per kilowatt hour (kWh), and in combination with battery systems, between 6.0 and 10.8 cents/kWh.
That’s a steep discount to current fossil fuel power plant costs, with electricity from brown coal-fired plants costing 15.1 to 25.7 cents and hard coal-fired plants 17.3 to 29.3 cents.
Nuclear is a bit of an outlier, with a much wider average of between 13.6 to 49.0 cents/kWh, highlighting the variability of the technology.
Overall, hybrid renewable systems in Germany are not only more environmentally friendly, but also more cost-effective per kWh, based on Fraunhofer’s modelling.