SRC-146

Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026, incorporating Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis Version 19.0 and Levelized Cost of Storage Analysis Version 11.0.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-0263 A widely used financial-industry cost report estimates 2026 U.S. power costs, without subsidy, as follows: utility solar 40-98 dollars per megawatt-hour, onshore wind 37-99, offshore wind 105-167, new gas power plants 51-129 (combined-cycle) or 144-276 (fast-response peaker plants), new nuclear 175-255, and new coal 72-177. These are today's costs only; the report does not attempt to project what these costs will be in future decades.
• CLM-0265 The same report assumes, by default, that a power project is financed 60 percent by debt (at 8 percent interest) and 40 percent by equity investors (who require a 12 percent return), giving a combined after-tax financing cost of about 7.7 percent. It also shows, separately, what happens if that financing cost is higher or lower, from as low as 4.2 percent to as high as 10.0 percent: at the low end, a typical utility solar project costs about 71 dollars per megawatt-hour; at the high end, about 106 dollars. Financing cost matters a lot for a technology like solar or nuclear that is very capital-intensive up front.
• CLM-0266 The report itself warns that its main headline cost figures leave out the wider costs of running a reliable power grid, things like power lines, backup capacity, and keeping the system balanced. It also says clearly that it is not trying to predict what power will cost in future years, and that it should not be read as the full cost of supplying electricity to a system, only the cost of building and running one project. This warning matters directly for any comparison against a claim about future, for example 2050, power costs, or against a source that assumes the wider grid costs are already included.
• CLM-0300 The 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 life, to break even overall.
• CLM-0303 A major financial advisory firm's own widely-used LCOE report says plainly that its numbers do not cover intermittency or total system cost.
• CLM-0312 A major financial advisory firm has estimated, using US grid operators' own published figures, what it adds to the cost of wind or solar to count them as dependable capacity alongside gas power stations; on its figures the addition is between about 8% and 85% of the plant's own cost, not many times more.
• CLM-0470 The same financial-industry report separately estimates what it costs to make solar and wind power as reliable as an always-on power plant, using the rules each U.S. grid operator actually applies to plan for enough capacity at peak demand. Across six major U.S. grid regions, firmed solar (without its own storage) costs about 92-135 dollars per megawatt-hour; solar with four hours of battery storage, also firmed, costs about 115-167 dollars per megawatt-hour. Firmed onshore wind costs about 87-118 dollars, and wind with storage about 103-146 dollars. The report itself is careful to say this "firming cost" is not the same as the cost of building a resource that can run for a full 24 hours a day on one site; it reflects each region's own accepted method of crediting how much a plant contributes to keeping the lights on at peak times.
• CLM-0524 Every UK-specific or typical-country cost-of-capital figure found sits well below the 20% rate Frazer-Nash used, even at the top of DESNZ's published range for floating offshore wind; only a global dataset covering the riskiest countries in the world reaches as high as 20%, and only at its extreme end.

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