

Nevada utility strikes cheapest electricity price in US with solar farm - prostoalex
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/buffett-strikes-cheapest-electricity-price-in-us-with-nevada-solar-farm_100020120/#axzz3fMNqBqSH

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ghshephard
The numbers in this article make no sense:

"The PPA undercuts a previous price agreed with NV Energy last year -
$0.46/kWh from SunEdison’s 100 MW Boulder Solar Project – and could quite
possibly be the cheapest electricity in the U.S."

$0.46/kWh is outrageously exensive. Anybody could undercut that.

"NV Energy, a Nevada-based utility owned by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, has
agreed to pay just $0.3.87/kWh for solar electricity from the 100 MW Playa
Solar 2 project being developed by U.S. thin film company First Solar."

What is "$0.3.87/kWh" supposed to even mean?

It may sound pedantic, and what they _might_ be saying is that the electricity
is $0.0387/kWh versus $0.046/kWh" \- but the entire _point_ of the article is
specificity around the prices, you would think they would nail that -
particularly in something called "pv-magazine.com"

A much more substantive critique - how much of that low price is a result of
government subsidies, and what is the "natural, unsubsidized price", and,
also, how will that price change as subsidies for solar expire at the end of
this year?

[Edit, a few minutes later - the style of numbering with the weird placement
of the decimals is consistent throughout the article, and one I've never seen
before in an english language article - is anyone else familiar with it? Makes
reading the article extremely challenging.]

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pjc50
Try this version which is closer to the original press release and hasn't
garbled the prices:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/buffett-
sc...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/buffett-scores-
cheapest-electricity-rate-with-nevada-solar-farms)

"Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s NV Energy agreed to pay 3.87 cents a kilowatt-hour
... Last year the utility was paying 13.77 cents a kilowatt-hour for renewable
energy ... The utility also agreed to pay 4.6 cents a kilowatt-hour for power
from SunPower Corp.’s 100-megawatt Boulder Solar project."

