Costs of Atmospheric Fluidized-Bed Combustors for Electric Power Generation

Frederick C. Scherr and Jack A. Fuller

The Energy Journal, 2002, vol. Volume23, issue Number 1, 117-132

Abstract: Atmospheric fluidized-bed combustion (AFBC) is the prevalent technology in boiler design for new power plants. Using plant-level cost data from a sample of commercial AFBC powerplants, we examine the effects of fuel type (scrap coal or standard-grade coal), plant size, and plant completion date on fuel costs, operating costs, capital costs, and levelized total costs per unit of electrical output. We find important relationships between the type of fuel used and unit-output fuel costs (AFBC plants burning scrap are cheaper in fuel per unit of output, despite the lower heat content of scrap) and between operating costs and plant size (larger AFBC plants are cheaper to run). While we find that the advantage in unit fuel costs is not reflected in levelized total costs (which are affected only by plant size), this result may be caused by our procedure for calculating levelized total costs from component costs.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=1381 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:2002v23-01-a06

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().