In addition to capital charge factor, there's one more common shorthand we'll use throughout these problems: citing fixed costs in $/kW of capacity. In the video you heard Daniel describe the natural gas plant as costing $100M for a 100 MW plant, with $10M/yr in fixed operations and maintenance. Instead, he could have divided those cost figures by the total capacity, and said that the capital cost was $1000/kW and fixed operations and maintenance was $100/kW of capacity per year. This is convenient because once you're familiar with the approximate per-capacity capital costs of power plants (around $1000/kW for natural gas plants, around $3000/kW for coal plants, etc) you can quickly estimate the levelized cost of electricity for lots of plants of different sizes. Most references for the capital costs of power plants, like this one from the US EIA, use this convention. It also simplifies levelized cost calculations, eliminating the need to explicitly divide by the capacity of the plant like Daniel did around 1:25 in the video above. Let's try using it in the following problem.

Coal Plant LCOE

0.0/30.0 puntos (calificado)

Consider a coal plant with the following characteristics:

• Capital cost of $3300 per kW
• CCF of 0.11
• FOM costs of $106 per kW-year
• Fuel costs of $1.10 per GJ
• Utilization of 77% (about 6750 hours per year)
• VOM costs of $0.0055 per kWh
• Efficiency of 33%

Part 1: What are the fixed costs in dollars per kilowatt-hour?

$/kWh sin responder

Part 2: What are the variable costs in dollars per kilowatt-hour?

$/kWh sin responder

Part 3: What is the total LCOE in dollars per kilowatt-hour?

$/kWh sin responder

Part 4: Is the LCOE more sensitive to the capital cost or to the fuel cost? For example, does doubling the capital cost affect the LCOE more or less than doubling the fuel cost? Enter the word "capital" or "fuel". If the numbers are within 10% of each other, enter the word "same".

sin responder

Part 5: Let’s look at the effect of a carbon tax. The simplest way to do this is to add a price for carbon emissions to the cost of the fuel (coal). We’ll assume a commonly-discussed carbon tax of $20/tCO₂. Looking at our Conversion Sheet, we can see that coal emits 90 kg of CO₂/GJ; multiplying these emissions by $20/tCO₂ gives us an additional $1.7999999999999998 per GJ to add to the cost of the coal, almost tripling it! What’s the new LCOE with this carbon tax?

$/kWh sin responder

Part 6: Would the same carbon tax have more or less of an effect on a natural gas plant? Enter the word "more" or "less". If the numbers are within 10% of each other, enter the word "same".