Turning Oranges to Apples: A Cutting-Edge Price Comparison for Renewables

A new, comprehensive approach is now available for evaluating renewable energy project revenue and value holistically. Stakeholders increasingly compare renewable energy technologies based on prices from auctions and power purchase agreements (PPAs), but such face-value price comparisons can be misleading. Auction and PPA prices are often not directly comparable because they come from different value frameworks, jurisdictions or points in time, each reflecting their own markets, taxes, and regulatory environments.

To facilitate more meaningful comparisons, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—in collaboration with international researchers working under the International Energy Agency’s Wind Technology Collaboration Programme—have developed a new approach that uses project revenue and value assessments to facilitate improved “apples-to-apples” comparisons between projects and against established cost metrics.

Read the article in Joule to learn more about how the approach evaluates project revenue and value holistically and about its application to eight global offshore wind projects.