LCOE base year reported by WISDEM

Wind & Water Systems Engineering Software Tools
1

Hello,

I plan to use WISDEM to calculate the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for wind energy (electricity) across various locations in Canada (mostly onshore). Due to my limited understanding and knowledge of wind turbine physics and mechanics, I will not change the default wind turbine engineering model input values (except I think the number of turbines to adjust the rated capacity). I will focus only on the cost models and modify their input values to convert them from USD to Canadian dollars (CAD), e.g., bos_per_kW, opex_per_kW, turbine_number, labor_rate, painting_rate, electricity_price, etc., so I get the LCOE output from WISDEM in CAD/kWh.

My questions are attached below:

  1. Do you suggest using WISDEM as the best model (keeping in mind my limited knowledge of wind turbine engineering) for this purpose, or would any other model make more sense?
  2. What is the base year for the reported LCOE from the WISDEM model (could not find it in the analysis, modelling, or geometry files or the documentation)? I also want to make sure all cost variables values are scaled to the same year.
  3. Does this methodology make sense for calculating the LCOE in CAD/kWh? I would have converted only the LCOE from USD/kWh to CAD/kWh by multiplying it by the exchange rate, but there are certain inputs, like the electricity price, that I would like to specify to the model to get location-specific LCOEs across Canada.

Thank you for your time. I appreciate your response!!!
Regards,

Manish

2

Hello Manish,

In brief:

  1. If you have detailed costs for labor, materials unit costs, etc. then WISDEM is a good tool to do bottom-up cost calculations for the major turbine components.
  2. There is no base year for the WISDEM cost defaults. The materials costs and labor are constantly in flux and vary regionally, so we do not make an effort to keep them constantly current. Default values are updated whenever the relevant model sees some active development, but there can be many years before all modules are touched.
  3. I would recommend comparing both approaches for calculating CAD/kWh

Some additional comments:

  • The balance of station cost models, LandBOSSE and ORBIT, can also be run standalone and could be a fit for you depending on your use case. This tends to be a good fit for the project developer mindset that would purchase a turbine from an OEM at a contract price and needs to explore their own costs to install the turbines and build out the farm.
  • Inputting material costs and labor rates in CAD won’t necessarily put all turbine costs in CAD. A number of secondary components are sized and costed based on old regressions in the Cost & Scaling Model in USD units. For this reason, you should also be comparing against costs that simply convert USD to CAD.
  • Given the previous bullet, another approach to consider is converting all the regional cost inputs that you have in CAD to USD, then run WISDEM, and finally covert back to CAD.
  • Having some reference costs in CAD to validate against is highly recommended.
1 Like
3

Thank you, Garrett, for your response.

  1. I do not have a detailed cost breakdown for labour, material costs, etc. Thus, I don’t think I should try bottom-up cost calculations from WISDEM.
  2. Got it. Understandable, it takes a lot of time to change the cost numbers.
  3. Sounds good, I will try both approaches- converting each cost input variable to CAD from USD and converting the USD LCOE (obtained after running the default model) to CAD.

Based on your additional comments, I think the best approach would be to convert the CAD input variable to USD, run the model to obtain the LCOE in USD, and then convert it back to CAD. Then, validate these CAD LCOE numbers with the literature. I will try out LandBOSSE and ORBIT as well.

Thank you so much, Garrett!!! Have a nice day.