BEE 3299
Gas against solar plus battery, across three pillars
Result in one line
Nothing wins everywhere. Lithium mining is the biggest emissions hotspot on one side, burning gas on the other.
Context
- Course
- BEE 3299
- Semester
- Spring 2025
- Team
- Solo project
- My part
- Solo project. All of the research, modeling, analysis, and writing across the environmental, cost, and social pillars.
The problem
Most comparisons look at one thing and pick a winner. Environmental studies usually favor solar. Cost studies usually favor gas. The impact on workers and communities barely comes up.
I wanted all three side by side, measured on the same 1 MWh, so the tradeoffs are out in the open.
What I built
I compared a Texas natural gas plant against a solar plus battery system. For the environment, I tracked emissions, water, and land from extraction to end of life. For cost, I ran a life cycle cost analysis and included the cost of outages, using ERCOT's value of lost load of about $35,000 per MWh. For people, I looked at jobs and health impacts on the communities nearby.
What I found
- Functional unit for all three pillars1 MWh
- ERCOT value of lost load, per MWh~$35,000
- Environmental, cost, social3 pillars
Nothing wins everywhere. Gas is cheaper over its life, and the gap gets bigger once you count outages. It also supports more jobs, about 15 to 20 per MW. Solar plus battery is much cleaner to run.
The biggest emissions hotspot on the solar side is lithium mining, before the plant is ever built. On the gas side it's burning the gas, and nothing upstream fixes that.
Where it stops working
You can't add the three scores together. How much each one matters is a judgment call, and I leave that to the reader. The outage cost swings the cost results a lot, and social impact is the hardest of the three to measure, so treat it as the roughest of the three.