❊ Everything I Know About Power Plants I Learned From SimCity

We should be having a public conversation about power plants in Lebanon, and yet the topic too complex and technical for casual discussions. Is there a way to make this easier? Is there some sort of simplified model to see what our options are? Sure there is! And it comes from the oddest of all places: SimCity one of my favorite videogames when I was growing up.

To summarize quickly, this is a game where you are tasked with building a city. One of the decisions you have to make is choosing a power plant. The choice depends on many factors, including capacity, cost, amount of pollution and size of the city. To make it easier for you to reach an informed decision, the cost-related options are summarized thus:

Of course the prices are way off (I played this game 10 years ago), and the environmental costs are not factored in (the cheapest per megawatt is usually the most polluting) . But it’s useful in the sense that you get an idea of what the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of plant is, and how the options stack up against each other. For example, wind is cheap to build, but it hardly produces any electricity and each mega watt is very expensive.

There are other factors involved of course. Now Lebanon is proposing a natural gas plant because Lebanon will eventually be producing some. But this table is serves just as a guide to how cost decisions are supposed to be made when choosing power plants.

If anything, I hope I managed to make this conversation slightly less daunting.