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Abstract
CO_2 emissions and the resulting climate change implications are reorienting the US and parts of the world to a low-carbon energy future. While transitioning from coal to natural gas has made substantial contributions toward decreasing carbon emissions in the electric power sector this transition has its limits. Ultimately, zero-carbon emission energy sources (such as nuclear and renewables) will be needed to further reduce CO_2 emissions from the power sector. The debate between nuclear and renewables usually revolves around issues such as reliability, dispatchability, safety, and construction costs. Commonly, comparisons between solar and nuclear technologies are based on plant capacity, which, due to intermittency and capacity factors differences, isnt a normalized comparison. This research explores the costs associated with building and operating solar and nuclear plants based on a capacity- and generation-equivalence basis under a range of interest rates in order to compare the two technologies on a normalized generation basis.