Análise do custo nivelado de eletricidade considerando as externalidades: uma revisão sistemática da literatura

Abstract

The Levelized Cost Of Electricity (LCOE) is one of the metrics that has historically been used to compare the economic competitiveness between electricity generation technologies, having great relevance for the global electricity sector. Despite the advantages of using the LCOE to measure the competitiveness between technologies, the “traditional” calculation has some disadvantages, e.g., it does not take into account the intermittency characteristic associated with some technologies. Moreover, the traditional calculation generally does not consider the set of externalities, especially socio-environmental, associated with the technologies. Furthermore, the non-inclusion of externalities contradicts the current metrics for inserting renewable energies in the energy sector since they may erroneously value the advantages/disadvantages of each technology. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the main approaches and criteria used for the inclusion of externalities associated with electricity generation in the final calculation of the LCOE through a systematic review of the literature. In general, we concluded that incorporating externalities into the traditional LCOE calculation can strongly impact the final costs of each technology and, therefore, the relative economic attractiveness of the options. In addition, it was found that the final value of the LCOE with externalities showed significant variations between the analyzed studies. This is mainly due to the multidimensional nature associated with externalities, which can vary according to the type, characteristic, year of analysis, and location of each technology. In the environmental dimension, the most relevant criteria in the pricing of externalities in calculating the LCOE were CO2 emissions, while in the technical dimension, the local technology conditions were the most relevant criteria. When comparing the LCOE values with the externalities of the analyzed technologies, it has been noted that hydroelectric technology is still highly competitive, followed by solar technology (and its variations), biomass, and offshore wind, compared to other renewable technologies, for example. Pricing externalities for the LCOE calculation can be helpful for long-term planning models to compare future electricity scenarios and pathways for different power systems, for example.