Electricity Cost

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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