Levelized cost of energy measures the dollars per megawatt-hour a power plant needs to earn in revenue to break even over the course of its lifetime in present-value terms.
What makes LCOE so alluring is that it’s a way to compare any type of generator, whether it requires a large upfront investment but has few operating costs, like a utility-scale solar project, or whether its expenses are largely fuel costs incurred in the future, like a combined cycle natural gas plant. This is also why LCOE has its critics, who point out that a solar panel that only runs during certain times of day has a different value to the electricity system than a natural gas plant that can ramp up and down quickly or a nuclear plant that provides steady baseload power.
Anyway, here’s what we can learn from this year’s Lazard report.
1. Just about everything is getting more expensive
Curves that were once gently sloping downward are starting to look like incipient U’s. While longterm LCOE falls are still dramatic and impressive for some technologies — utility solar has fallen from $359 per megawatt-hour in 2009 to $69 in 2026 — the short term rises are worrisome. That $69 per megawatt hour represents a nearly 10% increase from 2025, when utility-scale solar had a LCOE of $58. And it’s not just renewables — the LCOE for a combined cycle natural gas plant rose from $78 per megawatt-hour to $90 in the past year. Gas plant LCOE got as low as $60 in 2021. That’s a 50% price hike in just five years.
2. Renewables are getting hammered on costs, but are still the cheapest in LCOE terms
Lazard attributed the increase in solar and wind LCOE to “higher capital costs, sustained interest rates, tariff pass-through and supply chain repricing.” These technologies are also the most “sensitive” to subsidies by way of the tax code, with federal tax tax credits taking the low end cost of utility solar to as low as $16 per megawatt hour. To the extent those tax credits are no longer available or weren’t accessible due to strict eligibility rules, that could be a source of future upward pressure on costs.
That being said, renewables “maintain their relative cost advantage despite facing the same cost pressures affecting the rest of the generation stack,” the Lazard analysts concluded.
3. That’s because gas is expensive and in high demand
Natural gas, meanwhile, is seeing prices spiral upward on huge and growing customer demand.
“Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE and historically long development lead times,” according to Lazard.
The report hints at what LCOE is not always able to capture, namely that generators like gas have attributes besides low cost that make them attractive. “New gas combined cycle plants offer the lowest-cost dispatchable power in high-demand and low-cost-gas environments,” the analysts point out.
Anyone building a new combined cycle gas plant, however, will have to deal with the high cost and low availability for turbines, which is “extending development timelines well beyond historical norms.” That provides an opening for renewables that can be deployed quickly and cheaply, like solar and accompanied by battery storage.
4. The gap between cheap and expensive projects is widening — even within the same technology
In 2019, the low end of LCOE for onshore end was $28 per megawatt-hour, according to Lazard’s figures, and the high end was $54. In 2026, however, the low end costs sits a bit higher at $37 per megawatt-hour, but the high end cost rose to $99. There’s a similar story for utility solar: in 2019, the spread between low and high was a snug $8 per megawatt-hour, while this year it’s ballooned to $58.
The broadening range is “likely reflecting that some project developers have been better able to mitigate broader cost pressures across supply chain and project-level economics than others,” the Lazard analysts wrote.
5. It’s really expensive to “firm” solar on the grid in — guess where — PJM
The Lazard report doesn’t just look at the discounted cost of individual generators over their lifetimes. It also tries to figure how much they cost on certain grids. One way of doing this is to look at what Lazard calls the “cost of firming intermittency” or “levelized firming costs.” This is essentially looking at what it costs to bring solar, solar and storage, and wind and storage onto actual grids considering their ability to perform when the grid is most stressed.
This measure tries to refine LCOE to give a sense of how various forms of energy generation compare to gas plants in real world circumstances, not just as a financial construct. This is not a perfect, real-world comparison — gas capacity needs to be “firmed” as well, as it’s not always entirely available at times of peak need — but at least it gives an idea of how these resources actually function in a real-world grid.
Even with firming costs, “renewables remain broadly cost-competitive,” the report concludes.
Not surprisingly, some of the most dramatic costs are in America’s most troubled electricity market, PJM Interconnection. The unsubsidized cost of firming intermittency for solar and storage is $167 per megawatt-hour, compared to $150 in Texas or $115 in California. That’s also compared to a $129 per megawatt-hour at the high end for conventional combined cycle gas plants in PJM.
PJM is notorious for its inability to bring on new resources quickly and its strict standards for accrediting the contribution of storage and renewables to grid stability.
While the Lazard authors explicitly caution that it doesn’t measure what the“total system costs are for 1 MWh of incremental electricity” and can’t say “the optimal mix of renewables, conventional generation and storage,” it does conclude that “firming costs and dispatchability are increasingly critical for comparing resources on a more complex grid.”
In short, no matter what ends up on the grid, grid planners will have to think carefully about how to make sure it’s reliable and works in concert with what’s already there.
International Council on Clean Transportation
