A local manufacturing industry consumes 5 MWh/day which currently is being purchased at so.17 kWh. The industry has hired you to evaluate building a power plant using renewable energy sources as opposed to purchasing power from the local electric company. The three renewable energy sources in consideration are Solar, (2) Wind, and (3) Geothermal. To build the infrastructure each renewable energy source consists of a one-time initial permitting fee to be filed with Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) which is as follows: Solar sio,ooo (2) Wind s20,ooo (3) Geothermal $40, ooo. As shown in Table 1 each of the renewable energy sources has other annual costs including waste disposal costs and other life cycle assessment costs (LCA) which include the violations of environmental laws, supplier failures and other regulatory risks. The estimated life cycles for each renewable energy source as well as discount rates to be applied are also shown in Table 1. Table 1: Costs associated with each renewable energy source along with estimated life cycle and discount rates. Renewable Waste disposal Other LCA Life cycle Discount rate energy source cost ($/yr) costs ($/yr) years Solar 10,000 $24,000 15 3 Wind 30,000 $40,000 20,000 $20,000 15 3 Geothermal Note: Waste disposal for solar panels is the solvent waste accumulated during cleaning process. While in case of wind turbines and geothermal plants i is the cleaning solvent waste and blowdown water