Energy generation cost projections
This collection brings together all documents relating to energy generation cost projections.
Electricity generation costs are a fundamental part of energy market analysis, and a good understanding of these costs on a comparable basis is important when analysing and designing policy.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero commissions regular updates by independent consultants, giving their, and key stakeholder, estimates of these costs. Cost data is broken down into detailed expenditure per MW or MWh for the lifetime of a plant, from planning costs right through construction and operating costs to eventual decommissioning costs.
These component costs are used to calculate a ‘levelised cost’ for each technology. This is the average cost over the lifetime of the plant of generating per MWh of electricity. Using levelised costs allows the comparison of costs across technologies.
It should be noted there is a large amount of uncertainty when estimating the future costs of electricity generation, due to the difficulty in forecasting future fuel prices and the construction costs of technologies that have yet to be deployed at a large scale in the UK.
2023
2020
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Updates to this page
Last updated 16 November 2023 + show all updates
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Added link to Review of power generation costs for floating offshore wind and tidal stream energy technologies.
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Added Energy generation costs 2023.
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Added Review of power generation costs for technologies eligible for Contracts for Difference.
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2020 electricity generation cost report and reports commissioned from independent consultants added.
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First published.