ENERGY COST IN GEOTHERMAL POWER PLANTS

Abstract

One of the most important parameters that shows the effectiveness of conventional and renewable energy plant is energy production cost. Especially, the first and second law efficiencies have second degree importance for geothermal power plants. The most important parameter is unit energy cost per kW in geothermal technology. Since every geothermal field and plant have own characteristic values, unit electricity production cost for geothermal power can vary at almost every geothermal field. In this paper, after general view to geothermal energy economy, the cost of energy is calculated for single flash power plant. To obtain more available result, levelized costs method is used. For this reason, a software has been developed and used for calculating energy cost. Keywords: Geothermal, Energy cost, Levelized costs.