I am preparing a study for the NCEA of the use of levelized costs as a metric for assessing the economic competitiveness of alternative generation technologies.
Thank you for an illuminating article Gordon. I confess puzzlement over the use of 1.8GW of wind and 1.5GW of solar generation, with 1GW of battery storage, to power a 1GW data centre. I can't readily put numbers to it, but having seen the variations in wind and solar generation on the UK grid, I would have thought a much higher peak generating capacity would be needed to cope with Dunkelflaute.with the required supply reliability. I will be happy to be corrected.
Sorry for not replying earlier. These figures are minimum estimates based on data for the US PJM regional transmission system which covers the region from New Jersey to Virginia and across to Illinois. That is because I was thinking about the comparison with the Microsoft deal with Constellation Energy. The crucial point is that solar load factors for this system are much higher than those for the UK - and especially during winter months. Also 1 GW of 8-hour batteries is a lot - most battery system are 4-hour system. Carrying out a detailed risk analysis is quite difficult for US regional transmission systems, because they don't have long sequences of detailed output data.
Thank you for an illuminating article Gordon. I confess puzzlement over the use of 1.8GW of wind and 1.5GW of solar generation, with 1GW of battery storage, to power a 1GW data centre. I can't readily put numbers to it, but having seen the variations in wind and solar generation on the UK grid, I would have thought a much higher peak generating capacity would be needed to cope with Dunkelflaute.with the required supply reliability. I will be happy to be corrected.
Sorry for not replying earlier. These figures are minimum estimates based on data for the US PJM regional transmission system which covers the region from New Jersey to Virginia and across to Illinois. That is because I was thinking about the comparison with the Microsoft deal with Constellation Energy. The crucial point is that solar load factors for this system are much higher than those for the UK - and especially during winter months. Also 1 GW of 8-hour batteries is a lot - most battery system are 4-hour system. Carrying out a detailed risk analysis is quite difficult for US regional transmission systems, because they don't have long sequences of detailed output data.