Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 16-8
Economy of scale trends for capital cost in Deutsche mark/m2 and annual energy produced in
kWh/m2 versus blade swept area. (Source: Institute of Solar Energy and Technology, University
of Kassel, Germany. With permission.)
with size.
Figure 16-8
s
hows the prevailing costs of wind turbines of various
sizes in Germany. The price band is DM/m
of the blade area, falling from
2
800 to 1200 DM/m
for small turbines to 500 to 800 DM/m2 for large turbines
of 50 meters diameter. The line showing the annual energy potential per
square meter rises from 630 kWh/m
2
in small turbines to 1,120 kWh/m
in
2
2
large turbines of 46 meters diameter.
With the technology and the scale of economy combined, the manufactur-
ing cost of new technologies has historically shown declining patterns. The
growth of new product eventually brings with it a stream of competitors
and the leaning curve benefits. A learning curve hypothesis has been com-
monly used to model such cost declines. The cost is modeled as an expo-
nentially decreasing function of the cumulative number of units produced
up to that time. A standard form for a cost decline is constant doubling,
where the cost is discounted by a fraction
when the cumulative production
doubles. For renewable electricity, the production units are MW of capacity
produced and kWh of electricity generated. If we want to monitor only one
production unit, the kWh generated includes both the MW capacity installed
and the length of the operating experience, thus, making it an inclusive unit
of production.
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