•Coal & Nuclear: The updated overnight capital cost estimates for coal and nuclear power plants are 25 to 37 percent above those in AEO2010. The higher cost estimates reflect many factors including the overall trend of rising costs of capital intensive technology in the power sector, higher global commodity prices, and the fact that there are relatively few construction firms with the ability to complete complex engineering projects such as a new nuclear or advanced coal power plant. The study assumes cost-sharing agreements between the project owner and the project construction contractors are reflective of those recently observed in the marketplace. As shown in Table 1, dual unit coal and nuclear plants generally have lower overnight costs per kilowatt than single-unit plants, reflecting their ability to take advantage of redundancies and scale economies in onsite infrastructure such as wastewater management and environmental controls to reduce the estimated total per-kilowatt cost of the project.
•Natural Gas: The updated cost estimates for natural gas combined cycle and combustion turbines generally remained similar to those of AEO2010
•Solar: The overnight capital costs for solar thermal and photovoltaic technologies dropped by 10 percent and 25 percent, respectively. The decrease in the cost of photovoltaics was due to the assumption of larger plant capacity and falling component costs.
•Onshore Wind: Overnight costs for onshore wind increased by about 21 percent relative to AEO 2010 assumptions. This is based on a specification for a new, stand-alone wind plant including all owners' costs and may differ from other reported costs in the literature, which are not fully characterized and may include sites that are built along side existing plants (and are thus able to avoid some amount of infrastructure costs).
•Offshore Wind: While offshore wind plants have been built in Europe, there have only been proposals in the United States, with final permitting only recently issued on the first of these proposals. The updated costs, some 50 percent higher than AEO 2010 estimates, are consistent with substantial first-of-a-kind costs that would likely be encountered when building projects in the United States, which largely lacks the unique infrastructure, needed to support this type of construction.
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