SRC-174

Levelized Costs of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2022.

Commissioned by US Government. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• 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-0302 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.
• CLM-0307 The 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 of each other; for some plants it does not expect to be built, such as offshore wind, coal and nuclear, value is half of cost or less.
• CLM-0315 Even 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 (NASA also counts nuclear with them, though nuclear is not renewable), that similarity means paying extra for space solar power buys almost no additional carbon saving compared with those low-carbon sources - and even compared with gas, the implied price per tonne of carbon saved is extremely high, about 1,250 to 1,400 dollars.

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