🔗 Wikipedia: Cost of Electricity by Source

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Economics 🔗 Electrical engineering

Different methods of electricity generation can incur significantly different costs, and these costs can occur at significantly different times relative to when the power is used. The costs include the initial capital, and the costs of continuous operation, fuel, and maintenance as well as the costs of de-commissioning and remediating any environmental damage. Calculations of these costs can be made at the point of connection to a load or to the electricity grid, so that they may or may not include the transmission costs.

For comparing different methods, it is useful to compare costs per unit of energy which is typically given per kilowatt-hour or megawatt-hour. This type of calculation assists policymakers, researchers and others to guide discussions and decision making but is usually complicated by the need to take account of differences in timing by means of a discount rate. The consensus of recent major global studies of generation costs is that wind and solar power are the lowest-cost sources of electricity available today.