Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory today released a new report: “The Cost of Transmission for Wind Energy: A Review of Transmission Planning Studies.” This report summarizes the implied transmission cost per kW of wind from a sample of 40 detailed transmission studies that include wind energy resource areas in their analysis. This sample of studies, completed from 2001-2008, covers a broad geographic area across the U.S.
The primary goal of reviewing these studies was to develop a better understanding of the transmission costs needed to access increasing quantities of wind generation. A secondary goal was to gain a better appreciation of the differences in transmission planning approaches used in the U.S., in order to identify those methodologies that might best be used to estimate the incremental transmission costs associated with wind development. Finally, the resulting dataset and discussion may inform the assumptions, methods, and results of higher-level assessment models that also seek to estimate the transmission costs associated with wind deployment.
The total range in transmission costs per kW of wind implicit in our study sample is vast, but the median cost of transmission from all scenarios is $300/kW, roughly 15 – 20% of the cost of building a wind project. In terms of cost per megawatt-hour of wind power generation, the median implied cost of transmission is found to be $15/MWh. These mid-range costs, though not insignificant, are also not overwhelming. Additionally, the limitations of our methodology likely err towards an over-statement of the incremental cost of transmission for wind. Finally, it deserves note that the transmission studies in our sample are reasonably consistent, as a whole, with two recent higher-level assessments of the transmission investments required to provide 20% wind electricity in the U.S. by 2030.
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