The Clean Energy Solutions Center, in partnership with the Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility (PRIF) is hosting this webinar titled, Project Costs for Renewable Generation Projects in the Pacific.  In a report published last month—Renewable Energy Costs in the Pacific—PRIF analyses the capital costs of large solar photovoltaic, wind and hydro generation projects built in the Pacific over the past decade. The study focuses on capital costs, while the importance of operation and maintenance costs and the levelized cost of electricity are acknowledged.

The large range of project costs for renewable generation projects in the Pacific is due to various factors, including remoteness, scale, local capacity, perceptions of risk, design parameters and any upgrades for existing infrastructure included in the project scope. And there are numerous challenges in obtaining cost breakdown data and making like-with-like comparisons. The webinar will focus on the key overall findings from the PV systems analysis but will provide general analysis of the system cost breakdowns obtained for the report, which provides useful insights for component and other costs.

This report provides an operational analysis of 2030 that includes spatially disaggregated, hourly commitment and dispatch modeling. Our modeling includes constraints on transmission, unit-specific costs and operating constraints, and hourly, weekly and seasonal inter-temporal constraints that have not been previously analyzed.