This is of course an interesting thread, but there is an enormous gap between prevailing belief and actual knowledge of the energy industry. Too much to get into, but one crucial point generally overlooked is that EVERY SINGLE FORM of energy production currently in use has either explicit or buried government subsidies, making it essentially impossible to compare the "true" cost of production. Some examples.
In the nuclear industry, the only reason there are any nuclear plants in the United States is that the federal government, via the Price Anderson act, limits liability for an accident to approximately $600 million, making the plants insurable. This is an explicit subsidy. Without this subsidy, there isn't an insurance company on earth that would insure a plant (what do you think the cost of the Three Mile Island accident was?). There are other, more complex subsidies in the nuclear industry, including the fact that plants are not required to dispose of their waste because the government cannot develop a repository for it. I could go on.
Natural gas is exempt from the clean water act and the clean air act, thanks to Dick Cheney. This is an implicit subsidy, as without this exemption their would be no fracking without an Environmental Impact Statement and regulatory legislation. Most of the gas in the U.S. comes from fracking, so what is the value of a blanket exemption from regulations that everyone else has to adhere to?
Wind turbines get an effective rebate of at least 2 cents per kilowatt hour from the government, and benefit from "clean energy" regulations requiring utilities to obtain a fixed percentage of power from "clean" sources. An explicit subsidy, but there are other subsidies in the form of government intervention in the wind turbine market via low cost loans. Same argument applies to solar power, check out the recent debacle with the DOE loan to the California solar company Solindra that went bankrupt, taking half a billion taxpayer dollars with it.
Oil companies get the oil depletion tax credit. They also get very low cost leases of federal land. Plus the benefit of the taxpayer funded strategic petroleum reserve. Hard to put a handle on the value of oil subsidies.
I could go on with examples of subsidies to hydropower, coal, wood burning plants etc. Gives me a headache. As an investor seeking to make an honest profit from energy, it is frustrating that the actual value of subsidies is impossible to determine, so I have no real idea what the true cost of any particular form of power is. Makes it hard to select a good investment.