Opinion: Embarking on a quest for clean energy

I am on a hunt for cheap energy. If we systematically catalog all the places in the world with the cheapest power, two broad categories emerge. Either energy costs are low because of some form of state subsidy that keeps them artificially low, or electricity is produced from large, legacy power plants that are usually – but not always – hydroelectric. The “legacy” part of this really matters. That’s because all of the debt associated with building the project has long been paid off, and is no longer included in the rates customers pay. In Alaska, the most recent entry in the “legacy” club is Bradley Lake, which at less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour is now one of the cheapest sources of power on the Railbelt. This contrasts markedly with the fact that it was the most expensive power on the grid when it first became operational in 1991, after five years of construction, and decades after it was first proposed.