NREL releases new baseline cost and prices for electricity generation
Golden, Colorado campus of NREL (source: NREL)
Carlo Cariaga
7 Aug 2019
With the 2019 update to the Annual Technology Baseline by NREL, a rigorous analysis of electricity-generation technologies, including resource potential estimates and forecasted O&M costs, has been made available to the power generation industry.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released a 2019 update to the Annual Technology Baseline (ATB), a key source of reliable electricity generation technology cost and performance data used to support and inform electric sector analysis in the United States. Now in its fifth year, the ATB documents technology-specific information on a broad spectrum of electricity-generation technologies—including wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, biopower, coal, natural gas, and nuclear—as well as battery energy storage.
The ATB integrates current and projected data from various sources into a highly accessible and widely referenced resource for energy analysts. The 2019 ATB is available here and will be featured in a webinar on Aug. 22.
Data for geothermal energy can be found here.
Geothermal technology cost and performance projections have been updated with analysis and results from the GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath our Feet report (DOE, 2019), we reported on. The analysis in the report updates resource potential estimates as well as current and projected capital and O&M costs based on rigorous, bottom-up modeling.
