Electricity Today T&D Magazine

Often when project developers talk about the cost of a new power plant, wind farm, or solar installation, they’re referring to the capital cost of building a facility. Certainly those development costs have dropped over time—especially for wind and solar.

But developers overlook the cost to move power—at their peril. You might think that transmission costs—at least the fraction of those that developers of new plants must bear—are a very small part of the total. This is true for some types of renewable generation. Rooftop solar, for example, does not usually require upgrades to electric transmission systems that are designed to transmit high voltage electricity over long distances. But what about for utility-scale renewable projects?

Here, it’s less clear, so we examined the issue closely as part of our Full Cost of Electricity (FCe-) study in the white paper “Estimation of Transmission Costs for New Generation”
[PDF]. In recent years...