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Comment by JBReefer | Hacker News Reader

$245 Million for a _17_ megawatt plant seems insane - the Georgia and Kansas plants both are in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion a pop, and are ~50 times as powerful. I get that economies of scale are huge in power and that Fairbanks isn't exactly Georgia, but wow.

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Everything is expensive in Alaska as you have to ferry things from mainland USA. More importantly people who will be less willing to work in cold harsh and depressing climate of the winter. Most workers will have 1 month work 1 month paid off. It is not very unusual. (Ditto for Hawaii)

I am under the impression that cost of materials and construction in Alaska will be significantly higher than in Georgia or Kansas. It costs more money both for skilled labor and to get the materials out to a relatively remote location.

If this were Stack Overflow, your comment should be the winner.

Yes a typical nuclear power plant would average 1 GW, so to me, the smallness of the coal plant and its exorbitant price should be the core facts of the article.

Maybe due to the remoteness of the location, they couldn't build an offshore wind farm and send the electricity over the grid (although I'm skeptical that they put enough energy into exploring this option).

Someday we'll probably be drying algae, hemp, switchgrass or peat as feedstock for these legacy fossil fuel plants.

That was my first thought too. At $1/W, 17MW of solar power would be $17mm + supporting infrastructure and that would be very expensive for solar at that scale. I don't know what coal plants typically cost but this seems an order of magnitude too high.

True, although to be fair I imagine it harder to build a power station in Alaska. And solar isn't going to be a great solution either!

Alaska gets quite a bit less sun than the rest of the US and would need maybe 2x over-provision. And no idea what people will do for electricity the other 20 hours a day where solar panels are either useless or nearly useless. Also, cloudy days.

I wasn't trying to say solar was a good solution in this situation. I was giving a cost comparison to highlight how high this seems to be.

Fairbanks is a population of just ~30K, regularly has -50F temperatures during the winter, so it might not be directly comparable to a similar effort in KS or GA.

Everything is expensive in AK.

You can buy a "new surplus" 35 mW diesel generator plant right here:

https://www.industrialgeneratorsforsale.com/product/caterpil...

I didn't RFQ, but I'm guessing below $1M...

They need this and a storage tank.

Here's another: $125K per 1.7 mW..

https://www.industrialdiesel.net/Generator-Sets/3516-CATERPI...

The story should be about gross tuitions at pubic universities..

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