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What does this mean? >Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 14.0) shows that as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, cer
by 99_00 6y ago
What does this mean?
>Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 14.0) shows that as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, certain technologies (e.g., onshore wind and utility-scale solar), which became cost-competitive with conventional generation several years ago on a new-build basis, continue to maintain competitiveness with the marginal cost of selected existing conventional generation technologies.
I assume new-build is building a wind for or nat gas plant.
What is marginal cost? Is that adding capacity to a wind farm or nat gas plant, or just having an existing nat gas plant generate more power per day.
Are they basically saying that renewables are competitive when capital costs are included and also when capital costs are excluded?
- reitzensteinm 6y agoYeah, they're saying that it's cheaper to build renewables than continuing to run fossil fuel plants. The marginal costs are for additional power once you own the plant. I believe around 80% of the lifetime cost of a fossil fuel plant is the fuel itself, so even if you're gifted a plant for free it may not be economical to run. The fly in the soup is intermittency, but grids are generally able to absorb more renewables (wholesale price dropping below 0 is the indicator saturation has happened). And electric cars are going to mean a bunch more dispatchable demand and eventually V2G.