Value chain · CLM-0302
In plain terms
The US government's own energy statistics agency warns that comparing plain LCOE across different kinds of power plant, without also looking at value, can be misleading.
The claim as recorded
The US Energy Information Administration states that "LCOE and LCOS by themselves do not capture all of the factors that contribute to actual investment decisions, making direct comparisons of LCOE and LCOS across technologies problematic and misleading," and separately that dispatchable technologies "generally have more value to a system than less flexible units that use intermittent resources to operate," which it terms resource-constrained technologies. It adds that even LCOE, LCOS and LACE taken together do not fully capture all the factors considered in its own NEMS model.
Scope and limits
EIA's own caveat is about LCOE and LCOS used without LACE, not specifically about SBSP. Its dispatchable/resource-constrained distinction is a real category in its own published tables (see CLM-0307) but has not been applied by EIA to a space-based system.
What it assumes
No assumptions are recorded against this claim.
Where it comes from
p.3: "LCOE and LCOS by themselves do not capture all of the factors that contribute to actual investment decisions, making direct comparisons of LCOE and LCOS across technologies problematic and misleading as a method to assess the economic competitiveness of various generation alternatives." p.3: "generating units with the capability to vary output to follow demand (dispatchable technologies) generally have more value to a system than less flexible units that use intermittent resources to operate (resource-constrained technologies)." p.1: "Although LCOE, LCOS, and LACE do not fully capture all the factors considered in NEMS, when used together as a value-cost ratio (the ratio of LACE-to-LCOE or LACE-to-LCOS), they provide a reasonable comparison of first-order economic competitiveness". p.5: "these estimates may not fully capture all of the factors considered in NEMS or match modeled results."
Related records
- Answers question
- QST-021 not published in this release
Cite this
energyaperture.com/c/clm-0302
CLM-0302, Energy Aperture, as of 2022-03.
Connected records
Other published records linked to this one. A list, not a judgement.
- Also from SRC-174
- CLM-0300The main international definition of LCOE is the flat price per unit of electricity a power plant would need to be paid, every year of its...CLM-0307The US government's avoided-cost metric shows that, for the power plants it expects to be built, value and cost are within about 25 percent...CLM-0315Even though NASA's own figures say space solar power's carbon footprint is about as good as five renewable sources of power on the ground...
- Cited in articles