Cost per Power Capacity For a number of energy technologies I\'d like to know wh
ID: 2284574 • Letter: C
Question
Cost per Power Capacity
For a number of energy technologies I'd like to know what the minimum costs are to install a given power capacity. Are there any such comparisons available?
Research Spendings
Technologies often own much to publicly funded research efforts so I'm also interested in estimations regarding development cost of the technologies themselves. Of course foundations to a given technology may have been readily available, so let's limit this to spendings on larger research projects dedicated to developing a technology and motivated by the need of energy. I'm aware it's unlikely any exhaustive comparison in full detail exists but maybe something related?
(Maybe someone should tag this question 'energy-economics' -- I'm lacking the reputation)
Explanation / Answer
I have found this article in Wikipedia on relative energy costs. It contains a lot of data and some discussion.
To summarise parts of it we note that the official UN bodies have developed a formula called "Levelised Energy Cost" (LEC) which is a lifetime accounting formula which includes the following cost factors:
Investment (per year) - the totals are over the n years of the system's life.
Maintenance and Operations (per year)
Fuel Use (per year) [minimal for some sources like Nuclear, obviously high for anything Coal/oil based.]
With the benefit factor being the Electricity generation itself (per year).
As the other Answers have reminded us, with Nuclear in particular we need to be careful about including the "hidden subsidy" and dual use (civilian/military) of these technologies, so maybe one should use the Nuclear columns in the data as a reference point, and investigate it in more detail if required. For the less military fuels the data may be more accurate (at least from that perspective).
So the data tables in these lists give the LEC values, for the different energy types as estimated by various national bodies: US, UK , Australia.
Here is the US DOE Table
Here is a recent (commercial) study for the UK:-
Technology -------------------------------------- Cost range (