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<p>DECC has published levelised costs estimates of various generation technologies on the DECC website since 2010. The levelised cost of a particular generation technology is the ratio of the total costs of a generic plant to the total amount of electricity expected to be generated over the plant's lifetime (per megawatt hour). Levelised costs include installation costs, but also pre-development costs, infrastructure costs, operating costs, connection costs and carbon and fuel costs. They do not include revenues or support payments, The estimates include estimates of costs for plants starting now and in the future. All documents relating to electricity generation costs are available on the DECC website:</p><p>https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-of-energy-climate-change/series/energy-generation-cost-projections</p><p>Levelised cost estimates for different types of electricity generation are highly sensitive to the assumptions used for capital costs, fuel and EU ETS allowance prices, operating costs, load factor, discount rate and other drivers and this means that there is significant uncertainty around these estimates. It is perhaps more appropriate to consider a range of cost estimates as pipeline projects show a large range around these central values. These are shown in Table 2 for a range around capital costs and fuel prices for projects starting in 2012 and 2013.</p> |