Reviewing electricity production cost assessments

Simon Larsson, Dean Fantazzini, Simon Davidsson, Sven Kullander and Mikael Hook

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: A thorough review of twelve recent studies of production costs from different power generating technologies was conducted and a wide range in cost estimates was found. The reviewed studies show differences in their methodologies and assumptions, making the stated cost figures not directly comparable and unsuitable to be generalized to represent the costs for entire technologies. Moreover, current levelized costs of electricity methodologies focus only on the producer's costs, while additional costs viewed from a consumer perspective and on external costs with impact on society should be included if these results are to be used for planning. Although this type of electricity production cost assessments can be useful, the habit of generalizing electricity production cost figures for entire technologies is problematic. Cost escalations tend to occur rapidly with time, the impact of economies of scale is significant, costs are in many cases site-specific, and country-specific circumstances affect production costs. Assumptions on the cost-influencing factors such as discount rates, fuel prices and heat credits fluctuate considerably and have a significant impact on production cost results. Electricity production costs assessments similar to the studies reviewed in this work disregard many important cost factors, making them inadequate for decision and policy making, and should only be used to provide rough ballpark estimates with respect to a given system boundary. Caution when using electricity production cost estimates are recommended, and further studies investigating cost under different circumstances, both for producers and society as a whole are called for. Also, policy makers should be aware of the potentially widely different results coming from electricity production cost estimates under different assumptions.

Keywords: Electricity generation costs; levelized costs; energy market analysis; cost comparisons; policy implications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L94 Q00 Q20 Q30 Q40 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-ene and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/50306/1/MPRA_paper_50306.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Reviewing electricity production cost assessments (2014)
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:pra:mprapa:50306

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().