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Comment by c2h5oh | Hacker News Reader

Current wholesale price of electricity in EU is 110-120 USD / MWh.

5 * 110 Euro * 24 hours * 365 days * 8 years planned service life = $38,533,000. If they can offer a price under 5M USD per MW they won't have problem finding buyers.

This doesn't even account for savings for businesses that can consume most of that output - they save another 20-30% on transmission fees + there are several MW of waste heat as low temperature steam that can be used directly or indirectly in many industrial processes.

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Fuel costs, maintenance, and operation would be over $2M.

Normal energy prices are about half of what you quoted. It's TBD if they come back down to normal in the near future in the EU.

You're looking at $18M in revenue. This thing will probably cost more than $10M to purchase, and then you need land, a grid-tie in, and permits.

It would still work - but the numbers aren't going to look as good as wind & especially solar.

If they're modular then they'll be intended to run more than one. You get the land, grid tie-in, permits and staff and then... stack 4 of these instead of 1. You use the same benefits from economies of scale to have as many of these as can be safely crammed into your building and go from there.

I wonder what the cost of decommissioning is. That's easy to ignore just like it's easy to ignore the cost of mitigating the CO2 emissions from gas...

Comparing the price of unreliable energy to reliable energy is like comparing the price of a junk bond with a treasury and wondering why the latter costs so much more. It costs more because when you turn it on you get a known and reliable source of power, day or night, cloudy or sunny, windy or quiet. That's why it costs more.

This thing only outputs hot water, you need a lot more equipment and people to turn that into useful power on the grid.

Yeah dedicated units for large industry would be a huge buyer here: if you can hit the right price point, aluminium smelters in particular would be very interested customers I suspect.

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