Unlike natural gas-fired generation, renewable generation (e.g., from wind, solar, and geothermal power) is largely immune to fuel price risk. If ratepayers are rational and value long-term price stability, then--contrary to common practice--any comparison of the levelized cost of renewable to gas-fired generation should be based on a hedged gas price input, rather than an uncertain gas price forecast. This paper compares natural gas prices that can be locked in through futures, swaps, and physical supply contracts to contemporaneous long-term forecasts of spot gas prices. We find that from 2000-2003, forward gas prices for terms of 2-10 years have been considerably higher than most contemporaneous long-term gas price forecasts. This difference is striking, and implies that comparisons between renewable and gas-fired generation based on these forecasts over this period have arguably yielded results that are biased in favor of gas-fired generation.

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The increasing demands of computationally challenging applications and the advance of larger more powerful computers with more complicated architectures have necessitated the development of new solvers and preconditioners. Since the implementation of these methods is quite complex, the use of high performance libraries with the newest efficient solvers and preconditioners becomes more important for promulgating their use into applications with relative ease. The hypre library [14, 17] has been designed with the primary goal of providing users with advanced scalable parallel preconditioners. Issues of robustness, ease of use, flexibility and interoperability have also been important. It can be used both as a solver package and as a framework for algorithm development. Its object model is more general and flexible than most current generation solver libraries [9]. hypre also provides several of the most commonly used solvers, such as conjugate gradient for symmetric systems or GMRES for nonsymmetric systems to be used in conjunction with the preconditioners. Design innovations have been made to enable access to the library in the way that applications users naturally think about their problems. For example, application developers that use structured grids, typically think of their problems in terms of stencils and grids. hypre's users do …