I wish these reports would include required other costs, as solar needs to be paired with grid-scale storage or, more often, peaker natural gas plants. Both of which are pretty expensive.
It may still be cheaper, I honestly don’t know, because all the reports leave such necessary, and expensive, things out.
This is an industry study that gets published every year by Lazard, for the past 18 years. It is focused on the US market. They put in a lot of effort to assess the whole cost of various forms of energy generation, including government subsidies.
Worth noting lot of industry experts in renewables and outside of it criticize LCOE for not properly taking inflation and total life cycle costs into account. It’s still a useful number but never let it be more than a single data point in determining which form of energy is cost effective balanced against environmental impact.
Edit: also worth noting, LCOE assumes 1:1 supply and demand, no power storage or other other factors if renewables produce more than demand needs, but credits them as if that supply was used. Additionally it doesn’t differentiate low demand and high demand costs that many areas use, which can skew the numbers significantly if not accounted for and just assumed energy prices are constant throughout the day.
Thank you for the link, that is exactly what I was looking for. Biggest takeaway for me here is solar/wind + storage is competitive with natural gas generators, which is what they are primarily competing with economically.
I wish these reports would include required other costs, as solar needs to be paired with grid-scale storage or, more often, peaker natural gas plants. Both of which are pretty expensive.
It may still be cheaper, I honestly don’t know, because all the reports leave such necessary, and expensive, things out.
So check this out:
Lazard - Levelized Cost of Energy
This is an industry study that gets published every year by Lazard, for the past 18 years. It is focused on the US market. They put in a lot of effort to assess the whole cost of various forms of energy generation, including government subsidies.
Worth noting lot of industry experts in renewables and outside of it criticize LCOE for not properly taking inflation and total life cycle costs into account. It’s still a useful number but never let it be more than a single data point in determining which form of energy is cost effective balanced against environmental impact.
Edit: also worth noting, LCOE assumes 1:1 supply and demand, no power storage or other other factors if renewables produce more than demand needs, but credits them as if that supply was used. Additionally it doesn’t differentiate low demand and high demand costs that many areas use, which can skew the numbers significantly if not accounted for and just assumed energy prices are constant throughout the day.
Thank you for the link, that is exactly what I was looking for. Biggest takeaway for me here is solar/wind + storage is competitive with natural gas generators, which is what they are primarily competing with economically.
The graph, from page 8: