Description
The Levelized Cost of Electricity, Historical, Baseline, US (v1.0) dataset provides county-level estimates of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) across the continental United States (CONUS) for the 2024 baseline year. It represents the average and technology-specific cost of electricity generation, incorporating both renewable and non-renewable sources. This dataset serves as a benchmark for understanding current regional differences in electricity generation costs and provides a reference point for comparing projected future scenarios.
Technical Description
The Levelized Cost of Electricity, Historical, Baseline, US (v1.0) dataset is derived from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) State and Local Planning for Energy (SLOPE) Platform, which provides county-level baseline LCOE data for 2024. The LCOE metric represents the average cost of building and operating a generation facility over its lifetime, incorporating capital expenditures, operations and maintenance (O&M), and fuel costs. For each county, an average LCOE was computed by taking the mean of all available generation technology LCOE values. The resulting dataset provides LCOE for individual generation technologies (e.g., solar, wind, gas, nuclear) alongside an overall average. All values are expressed in U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour (usd/mwh).
Baseline values originate from NREL’s 2024 Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) “Moderate” cost projections, incorporating technology- and region-specific assumptions for capital costs, O&M, fuel prices (from EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2023), and financing. These LCOEs represent new-build costs and include spur line construction costs for resource-based technologies (e.g., solar, wind, geothermal, hydro).