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So, you want to make your own energy/electricity?


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Consider this a brief introduction to the topic.

 

Whether you are just a homeowner, a business or a utility and you're looking to produce energy -- whether to save money or to make money -- suffice it to say we're living in an age of alternatives. There really are a plethora of ways to do that nowadays. Sources include natural gas, (crude) oil, coal, nuclear, hydro-electric, biomass, solar, wind and geothermal for the most part.

 

So how do you even begin to choose? While there are many factors to consider, a very important one is the lifetime costs of generation per unit of energy produced. The lifetime costs consists of three basic components: starting costs, running & maintenance costs and disposal costs. You really have to include EVERYTHING. Now you add all these up and what you get is the total lifetime cost. The next thing to do is make a calculation of how much electrical energy is going to be produced over the lifetime of the project.

 

Have those two figured out? Good. What you now do is take the total lifetime cost and divide it by the amount of lifetime energy production. What comes out the other end is the lifetime cost per lifetime production. The unit is often denoted in $/kWh or ¢/kWh (dollars or cents per kilowatt-hour). This is the so-called Levelized Cost of Energy.

 

This is how you can compare different energy sources and production methods in a more apples-to-apples kind of way.

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