Influence of Techno-Economic Factors on The Levelized Cost of Electricity of Wind and Solar Power Projects In India

The sustainable development of a renewable energy project mainly depends upon the finance. The ultimate cost of the power generation can be represented in terms of Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). The LCOE of a project depends upon several techno-economic aspects and the variation in their values clearly reflects in the LCOE. In present work, the LCOE of recent wind and solar power project has been calculated considering the influential techno-economic parameters and policy benefits. Further, the sensitivity analysis for these parameters has been conducted. The LCOE value of wind and solar power projects were derived to be ₹4.89/kWh and ₹4.05/kWh respectively. While availing the policy benefit of Accelerated Depreciation (AD), these values drop to ₹4.54/kWh and ₹3.77/kWh respectively for wind and solar projects. The deviation in the LCOE due to the fluctuation of techno-economic parameters has been estimated by means of sensitivity analysis. The analysis depicted that the capital cost and the capacity factor of the project are the most influential parameters for LCOE computation; followed by the discount rate and maintenance cost.