## 3 Levelised Cost of Electricity of CSP Plants Based on sCO\({}_{2}\)
### Overall Analysis of the Levelised Cost of Electricity  
The results obtained for the three CSP power plants described before, and for the four possible cases, are presented in Figures 7 and 8 for two reference locations in North America: Las Vegas and Tonopah (NV). These two locations are selected for their vicinity to existing Concentrated Solar Power plants using either collector technology, parabolic trough and central receiver, including the then first-of-a-kind Crescent Dunes project which made use of tower technology and an impressive Thermal Energy Storage system enabling operation at full capacity for ten hours. Five figures of merit are taken into account, spanning across the thermal and financial features of the plant:  
* Thermal performance:
* Yield (\(E_{year}\)), [GWh]: this is the annual production of electricity of the power plant. * Capacity Factor (\(CF\)), [%]: ratio from the system's annual production of electricity in the first year of operation to the theoretical energy production, should the system run at the rated capacity throughout the entire year. This is a measure of the electricity that the system would be able to produce if it were operated at its nominal capacity for every hour of the year, and it can be significantly affected by the plant location and by the operation (dispatch control) of the Thermal Energy Storage system. * Levelised Cost of Electricity \(LCoE\) [\(\zeta\)/kWh]: a measure of the total project life cycle costs relative to the total production of energy throughout the entire project lifetime. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline \hline
**Case No.** & **Financial Model** & **Dispatch Control** \\ \hline Case 1 & Default SAM & Default SAM \\ Case 2 & Default SAM & SunShot Vision Study \\ Case 3 & SunShot Vision Study & Default SAM \\ Case 4 & SunShot Vision Study & SunShot Vision Study \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 6: Cases showing different combinations of Dispatch Control and Financial Models. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline \hline  & **SAM Default** & **SunShot Vision Study** \\ \hline IRR target [\%] & \(11\) & \(15\) \\ IRR target Year & \(20\) & \(30\) \\ Analysis period [years] & \(25\) & \(35\) \\ Inflation rate [\%] & \(2.5\) & \(3\) \\ Nominal Discount rate [\%] & \(8.14\) & \(8.66\) \\ Loan Percent of total capital cost [\%] & \(50\) & \(60\) \\ Loan Duration [years] & \(18\) & \(15\) \\ Loan Annual interest rate [\%] & \(7\) & \(7.1\) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 4: Financial parameters employed in the SAM’s default and SunShot Vision cases. The parameters that are not reported here are set to the values used by SAM’s default model in Table 6. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Financial Model** & **Period 1** & **Period 2** & **Period 3** & **Period 4** & **Period 5** & **Period 6** \\ \hline SAM Default & \(2.064\) & \(1.2\) & \(1\) & \(1.1\) & \(0.8\) & \(0.7\) \\ SunShot Vision Study & \(3.28\) & \(1.28\) & \(0.67\) & \(1.02\) & \(0.82\) & \(0.65\) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: Different Time-of-Delivery factors employed by SAM’s Default and SunShot Vision Study’s financial models. * Net Present Value \(NPV\)[5]: discounted (present) value of the net cash inflow. * Internal Rate of Return \(IRR\), [%]: the nominal discount rate that would yield null \(NPV\) for given economic and financial assumptions (including the sales price of electricity specified in the _Power Purchase Agreement--PPA_. Figure 8: Levelised Cost of Electricity and Net Present Value of the three different cycles and four combinations of financial/dispatch control settings. Two locations in Nevada are considered: Las Vegas and Tonopah. Figure 7: Annual yield and capacity factor for the three power cycles and two locations considered. Designation of cases is explained in Table 6.  
Several observations are worthwhile in Figure 7. The location of a CSP plant is expected to have a very strong impact on the annual yield.