What we do. How we work. Founding documents. Nuclear safety research. Nuclear safety regulation. Human aspects of nuclear safety. Radiological protection. Radioactive waste management. Decommissioning and legacy management. Nuclear science. Nuclear technology. Nuclear economics. It comprises data for almost power plants from 17 OECD countries as well as from Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa, and features a wide array of technologies including coal both with and without carbon capture , natural gas, nuclear, hydro, on-shore and off-shore wind, solar, biomass, wave, tidal and combined heat and power CHP.
Projected Costs of Generating Electricity: Edition is the seventh in a series of studies on the costs of power generation and has established itself as an unrivalled reference in this domain. Experts from Brazil, India and Russia also participated. Thank you for subscribing. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of any IEA newsletter.
Close Search Submit. Checkbox Remember me. Sign in Sign in. Create an account Create a free IEA account to download our reports or subcribe to a paid service. Join for free Join for free. Share this report Close dialog. Report options Close dialog. This is an extract, full report available as PDF download. Download full report. Subscription successful Close dialog. The key insight from this edition is that the levelised costs of electricity generation of low- carbon generation technologies are falling and are increasingly below the costs of conventional fossil fuel generation.
Renewable energy costs have continued to decrease in recent years. Although costs vary strongly from country to country, this is true for a majority of countries 10 out of Also solar PV, if deployed at large scales and under favourable climatic conditions, can be very cost competitive.
Offshore wind is experiencing a major cost decrease compared to the previous edition. Both hydro technologies analyses run of river and reservoir can provide competitive alternatives where suitable sites exist, but costs remain very site-specific. Electricity from new nuclear power plants has lower expected costs in the edition than in Again, regional differences are considerable.
However, on average, overnight construction costs reflect cost reductions due to learning from first-of-a-kind FOAK projects in several OECD countries. Nuclear thus remains the dispatchable low-carbon technology with the lowest expected costs in Only large hydro reservoirs can provide a similar contribution at comparable costs but remain highly dependent on the natural endowments of individual countries.
Compared to fossil fuel-based generation, nuclear plants are expected to be more affordable than coal-fired plants. While gas-based combined-cycle gas turbines CCGTs are competitive in some regions, their LCOE very much depend on the prices for natural gas and carbon emissions in individual regions. Electricity produced from nuclear long-term operation LTO by lifetime extension is highly competitive and remains not only the least cost option for low-carbon generation - when compared to building new power plants - but for all power generation across the board.
Coal- and gas-fired units with carbon capture, utilisation and storage CCUS , for which only the United States and Australia submitted data, are, at a carbon price of USD 30 per tonne of CO 2 , currently not competitive with unmitigated fossil fuel-plants, nuclear energy, and in most regions, variable renewable generation.
CCUS-equipped plants would constitute a competitive complement to the power mix only at considerably higher carbon costs. Costs are calculated at the plant level busbar , and therefore do not include transmission and distribution costs. The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO 2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas.
This report does however recognise, in particular in Chapter 4, the importance of the system effects of different technologies, most notably the costs induced into the system by the variability of wind and solar PV at higher penetration rates.
The aggregated data for the 24 countries that provided data for this report does not tell the whole story of levelised generation costs. Due to more or less favourable sites for renewable generation, varying fuel costs and technology maturity, costs for all technologies can vary significantly by country and region.
In addition, the share of a technology in the total production of an electricity system makes a difference to its value, load factor and average costs. Whereas renewables are very competitive in most countries participating in this report, the data provided for Projected Costs of Generating Electricity — Edition shows that they still have higher costs than fossil fuel- or nuclear-based generation in some countries in this report: Japan, Korea and Russia.
Also within countries, different locational conditions can lead to differences in generation costs at the subnational and local level. In Europe, both onshore and offshore wind as well as utility scale solar installations are competitive to gas and new nuclear energy.
In the United States, gas-fired power plants benefit from the expected low fuel prices in the region, although fuel price assumptions are, in general, uncertain. Natural gas CCGTs are followed by offshore wind, nuclear new build and, finally, coal. In China and India, variable renewables are having the lowest expected levelised generation costs: utility scale solar PV and onshore wind are the least-cost options in both countries. Nuclear energy is also competitive, showing that both countries have promising options to transition out of their currently still highly carbon-intensive electricity generation.
Beyond investments in new sites greenfield projects , this report includes levelised cost estimates for the long-term operation of nuclear plants LTO — representing extensive refurbishments to enable a secure operation beyond the originally intended lifetime.
The report shows that this brownfield investment, i. Even at lower utilisation rates, a potential scenario for nuclear units in systems with high shares of variable renewables, costs are below those of new investments in other low-carbon technologies. Other low-carbon technologies with long lifetimes, in particular hydroelectric plants, could be similarly attractive for such LTO investments but no cost data was submitted. With higher emission costs however, the picture could change.
At such high carbon prices, renewables, hydroelectricity or nuclear are likely to constitute the least-cost options to ensure low-carbon electricity. Thus, if flexible low-carbon generation is needed, competitive alternatives are lacking and affordable fossil resources are available, CCUS may become an option. Depending on national circumstances, with sufficiently high carbon prices, CCUS could be a possible complement in certain low-carbon power mixes.
To enhance the comparability of costs between regions and markets, it was necessary to harmonise certain assumptions. Depending on the individual market, these parameters can differ significantly, based on the existing technology mix as well as the market environment.
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