Question

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are the relative current delivered costs of electricity delivered to users in the United Kingdom produced respectively by nuclear fusion, offshore electricity, solar photovoltaic, gas and coal.

DECC’s most recently published figures for the levelised costs of electricity generation for different technologies are available in the DECC Electricity Generation Costs (December 2013) report:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/269888/131217_Electricity_Generation_costs_report_December_2013_Final.pdf

Table 1 below is taken from this report, and shows a range of levelised cost estimates for nuclear offshore wind, solar photovoltaic, and gas projects commissioning in 2014 and 2020 at technology specific hurdle rates (pre-tax real). Estimates are not published for nuclear projects commissioning in 2014, or coal projects without carbon capture and storage commissioning in 2014 or 2020 given there will be no new projects commissioned in this timeframe. DECC does not publish cost estimates for nuclear fusion.

Table 1: Levelised cost estimates for different technologies, technology specific hurdle rates, sensitivities around high/low capital costs

* CCGT: Combined Cycle Gas Turbine

The levelised cost of a particular generation technology is the ratio of the total costs of a generic plant to the total amount of electricity expected to be generated over the plant’s lifetime (per megawatt hour). Levelised cost estimates are highly sensitive to the assumptions used for capital costs, fuel and EU ETS allowance prices, operating costs, load factor, discount rate and other drivers and this means that there is significant uncertainty around these estimates. Estimates of levelised costs differ from the retail electricity prices that are paid by consumers (i.e. on delivery of electricity).