May 12, 2009 update on levelized costs. This summary produced by the Institute for Energy Research is based upon the USA Energy Information Adminstration (EIA) Updated Annual Energy Outlook 2009 Reference Case. This is an update that attempts to account for the impact of the Obama “stimulus”. Like the base case AEO2009 the EIA projects essentially zero growth in nuclear generation, while again showing that nuclear is the lowest cost zero carbon option. Go figure…
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) produces forecasts of energy supply and demand for the next 20 years using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS)[1]. These forecasts are updated annually and published in the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO). EIA published a preliminary version of the AEO 2009 in December 2008, and updated the forecasts in April, 2009, to incorporate the energy provisions in the stimulus.[2] All sectors of the energy system are represented in NEMS, including the electric power generation, transmission, and distribution system.
To meet electricity demand, the EIA represents the existing generating plants, retires those that have come to the end of their economic life, and builds additional plants to meet projected demand from the residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors. As a result, EIA must represent a slate of technologies, their capital and operating costs, their availability and capacity factors, the financial structure and subsidies, the time to construct the plant, the utilization of the plant, and expected future cost changes, including fuel input for fossil and nuclear plants.
To determine the most economic technology for the type of demand (base, intermediate, or peaking load) for which new capacity is needed, NEMS competes the technologies based on the economics of their levelized costs. Levelized costs represent the present value of the total cost of building and operating a generating plant over its financial life, converted to equal annual payments and amortized over expected annual generation from an assumed duty cycle.
The table below provides the average national levelized costs for the generating technologies represented in the updated AEO2009 reference case.[3] The values shown in the table do not include financial incentives such as state or federal tax credits, which impact the cost and the competitiveness of the technology. These incentives, however, are incorporated in the evaluation of the technologies in NEMS based on current laws and regulations in effect at the time of the modeling exercise, as well as regional differences in the cost and performance of the technology, such as labor rates and availability of wind or sun resources.
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