Comparing Power Generation: Coal, Gas, Nuclear, and Renewables
Program Overview
Learning Path
- Thermal generation fundamentals
Coal and gas plant operations Heat rates, efficiency curves, startup costs, cycling limitations, fuel supply considerations
- Nuclear power economics
Capital costs and construction times, capacity factors and availability, fuel costs and waste management, decommissioning provisions
- Variable renewable integration
Capacity factor versus capacity credit, curtailment and negative pricing, grid stability requirements, storage and flexibility needs
- Electricity market structures
Energy versus capacity markets, merit order dispatch, ancillary services, transmission constraints
- Comparative analysis framework
Levelized cost calculations, system-level costs, reliability contributions, carbon intensity across lifecycle
Detailed Information
Energy debates online are mostly nonsense. This course uses actual power plant operating data to compare technologies honestly.
You will examine capacity factors from real facilities, understand why natural gas plants cycle differently than coal units, and see what nuclear refueling outages mean for grid planning. We include the financial side because that drives what actually gets built.
The data tells interesting stories
A coal plant that cost 2 billion euros runs 40% of the time. A gas peaker sits idle 350 days per year but stays profitable. Wind farms hit 25% capacity factor while their owners make money. These contradictions make sense once you understand electricity markets and grid requirements.
You will work with dispatch curves, marginal cost calculations, and capacity payment structures. The environmental analysis includes full lifecycle impacts, not just operational emissions. This gets technical quickly, so comfort with graphs, spreadsheets, and basic statistics helps.