Projected Costs of Generating Electricity - OECD Nuclear Energy ...

Figure 5 – Competitiveness of various power production plants,
for short operation duration
€/MWh
300
Oil CT
Gas CT
250
Combined cycle gas turbine
Advanced gas CT
200
150
100
50
0
250 500 1 000 1 500 2 000 2 500 Hours of operation
Distributed generation
Hypotheses
The second part of the study “reference costs for power generating” is devoted to the decentralised
production. This type of generation is based on renewable sources of energy and techniques allowing the
saving in fossil fuels. Decentralised power plants, generally smaller than centralised ones, are supposed
to be closer to the consumer and to avoid additional investments in the regional grid. These economies in
grid investments have not been calculated.
The decentralised plants were divided into two great parts: on the one hand those whose maturity
allows to consider a development in the short or medium term and for which the data are relatively certain
(combined heat and power, small hydraulic, biogas, solar photovoltaic, onshore wind power), on the
other hand those more prospective for which uncertainty in the data is larger (fuel cell, geothermal, marine
energy). Biomass and offshore wind power will be studied in a later phase.
Some more details on the assumptions of cost of fuel must be brought for biogas and combined heat
and power: for biogas (landfill gas or digester) only the over-cost of producing biogas for power generation
compared to the alternative solution of processing waste without energy generation was taken into
account. For combined heat and power, the net generating cost is calculated by cutting off from the rough
cost the fuel and capital costs which would have been necessary to produce independently the quantity of
heat provided by the combined heat and power plant.
For wind power generation and solar photovoltaic, learning curves were used.
For onshore wind power generation, an additional cost for possible disturbance of the offer/demand
equilibrium was calculated but not included in Figure 6.
Results
Wind power generation, small hydroelectricity under good conditions of site, and combined heat and
power generation form part of the mature dies for which generation costs would be close, at horizon 2015
and taking into account their operation hours during the year, to combined cycle gas turbine working over
the year generating costs. Photovoltaic generating costs should remain high event though it is expected
that costs decrease rapidly (see Figure 6).
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