LFSOE - levelized full system cost of electricity, Bank of America 2023

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   kravietz 🦇 (kravietz@agora.echelon.pl)'s status on Wednesday, 25-Dec-2024 04:45:13 JST kravietz 🦇

   in reply to

   @happyinmotion

   100% agreed on the latter. The latter is true for any public utilities - water, healthcare etc. It’s only the US-derived fixation on private funding that makes things expensive that otherwise would be quite cheap. In the UK even water & sewage networks are private and they’re now getting bankrupt (e.g. Thames Water) in spite of the natural monopoly.

   I’m all for public investments in wind and solar, especially that they have to be balanced at the grid level. And this cost (LFSOE - levelized full system cost of electricity) cannot be ignored. Otherwise you end up with PV/wind generation curtailing when it’s excessive, or massively redundant generation capacity when they don’t work.

   When the balancing cost is accounted for, you end up with numbers that are not only not higher than nuclear, but actually much higher. Note that this model assumes LFSCOE calculated for the exclusive use of given source, so e.g. calculation for wind assumes 100% wind, storage and nothing else. A hybrid system where renewables are coupled with nuclear are both low-carbon and much cheaper than either of these sources alone.

   Not that nuclear alone is very expensive - it has the large initial capital cost, but LCOE is actually quite low due to long lifetime and high electricity output. That crazy $160/MWh number that everyone uses comes from Lazard study which openly admits it comes from a single (!) project in the US (!), so it’s extremely biased.

   @cstross