The
cost of electricity with respect to electricity supply authorities depends on several
factors. If these factors cost increased, the cost of the customers consumed
electricity "kwh bill" would increase. So electricity supply
authorities should be more interested in reducing these factors cost.
What are the factors that affect electricity cost?
Mainly
there are three factors:-
(1) Fuel
Cost:
It
considered as the most effective factor that affect the cost of electricity
generation, in fact many energy sources (fuels) can be used to generate
electricity but with a variable cost for example, the cheapest fuel cost is the
falling water power used in hydropower station and the most expensive is the
sun rays used by solar cells in solar power station.
(2) Building Cost:
The
second factor affect the electricity cost is the cost of the power plant
building itself and also its components for example nuclear power plants are
very expensive to build, but on the other hand their fuel (uranium) is
inexpensive. Also Coal-fired plants are cheaper to build, but their fuel (coal)
is more expensive so electricity supply authorities commonly do a number of technical
studies in indicate the most cheaper and effective power plant type.
(3) Efficiency:
One
of the most important factors that figure electricity cost, as supply authorities
must also consider the plant’s efficiency. Efficiency is the amount of useful
energy you get out of a system compared to the input energy. The most efficient
machine is the machine that converts all the energy input into useful work with
fewer amounts of losses. So in power plant, the more the plant efficiency the
less the cost of electricity generated.
In general, today’s power plants use (3)
units of fuel to produce one unit of electricity (kwh), as a typical coal power
plant burns about 8100 tons of coal each day and about two-thirds of the
chemical energy in the coal (5,300 tons) is lost as it is converted first to
heat energy and then to kinetic energy, and finally into electrical energy.
Most of the lost energy in power plants is the heat.
You can notice this wasted heat in the big clouds of steam pouring out of the
towers on some power plants
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