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What if technologies cost something other than the report's Reference?

Scenarios shown
The three most structurally distinct, as in the report's executive summary.
The power systems are fixed. Every scenario keeps the capacity and generation the study’s model chose for it at Reference costs. Nothing is re-optimised and nothing is re-run: if a technology became cheaper, the model would build more of it, and that is not shown here. What you see is what the same fleet costs at other prices.

What you change is what each technology costs, using the study’s five technology cost scenarios (Table 8 (p.54)). Each level is a combination of investment cost and cost of capital (WACC). The cost of every technology is recalculated bottom-up, as the study does it: its capacity times its annualised investment and fixed O&M cost, plus its generation times its variable and fuel cost, per MWh of annual demand.

Cost level for each technology

In brackets: the levelised cost from the study’s cost assumptions, and the WACC of the level. Solar and battery move together, as in the study’s scenario definitions (Table 4); biomass stays at Reference. Gas OC has the same investment cost at every level, so only the WACC moves it. The calculation reproduces the report’s per-technology costs at Reference, Conservative-1 and Conservative-2 for every scenario, and with them the cost levels and “Costs escalation” of the summary table (Table 1) and the gaps of Table 12. The Optimistic levels are calculated from the study’s own Optimistic inputs.

First, the cost

Each chart starts at the scenario’s cost with every technology at Reference (the cost level of the summary table) and adds or removes what your choice means for each technology. A scenario only moves if it uses the technology you have changed: a Conservative-2 nuclear cost, for example, raises costs most in the Nuclear scenarios, while the Offshore and Solar scenarios, which build no nuclear, do not move. The steps are measured from Reference, so they are smaller than the escalations in the report’s Figure 34, which are measured from the Base step.

Offshore
Balanced
Nuclear

Then, who carries it

Denmark’s large interconnectivity in the market relative to its system size strongly constrains its potential impact on the electricity market outcomes across the different scenarios.

[The] profitability gap [represents] the shortfall between system-wide technology costs and the market revenues captured by the supply technologies[.]

Market revenues are held where the study modelled them, so every euro added to system costs above is a euro added to the gap below. A wider gap is the size of support, or of unrecovered investment, that your choice of technology costs would imply; a negative gap means the fleet over-earns at those costs.

Offshore
Balanced
Nuclear

Shown as cost minus day-ahead revenue, as in the summary table (positive = shortfall). The report’s per-technology figures show the opposite sign (profitability). Table 12 (p.94) · Figure 40 (p.93) · §5.6.4 Market profitability (p.90)

Where this leaves the summary table

The study’s summary table, with your picks applied to the same fixed power systems. Only the costs and the profitability gap follow your choices. Every other row is the report’s own, since the power systems and the market outcomes are not re-run. Costs escalation stays as published: it is defined as the step from Reference to Conservative-2 for every technology at once. The shading of the two rows never stretches over a narrower range than the report’s own, so scenarios a few euros apart stay close in colour.

Best in rowWorst in row
Parameter / scenarioOffshoreBalancedNuclear
Degree of self-sufficiency →
Competitiveness →
Environmental & climate impact →
Grid & operational safety →

Light green is the best outcome per row and dark green the worst; the ranking is subjective (report p.135). Click a row for its definition.

Table 1 (p.11) · Table 18 (p.136) · §6.1 Summary table – comparing scenarios (p.134)

How sensitive each scenario is to each technology

The charts above show what your picks do to every scenario at once. Here the question turns around: how much does one scenario’s cost depend on the cost of each technology? Each line varies one technology across the study’s five cost levels (Table 8 (p.54)), with every other technology at Reference, on the same fixed power system. All lines meet at the scenario’s published value at Reference; the steeper a line, the more sensitive the scenario is to that technology’s cost.

System cost incl. imports, Balanced
Profitability gap, Balanced

Market revenues are held as modelled, so a technology moves the profitability gap by exactly as much as it moves the system cost: the two charts have the same lines at different levels, drawn to the same vertical scale. The gap chart shows where the gap closes (below zero, the fleet earns more than it costs). The cost levels are the study’s categories, not evenly spaced costs; nuclear’s lines are steep partly because its levels span the widest range. Lines in pale technology colours are drawn a shade darker than in the report’s figures, and solar & battery and wind offshore are dashed to tell them from nuclear and wind offshore nearshore.

From the cheapest level to the dearest, in every scenario

€/MWhBalancedOffshore BalancedOffshoreSolar BalancedSolarNuclear BalancedNuclear
Nuclear (SMR)17.08.10.08.10.028.049.8
Wind offshore nearshore12.114.516.013.615.010.47.4
Wind offshore10.112.715.611.412.78.13.2
Wind onshore6.86.86.86.86.86.86.8
Solar & battery2.12.42.72.43.11.60.9
Gas OC0.91.11.21.11.20.70.4

System cost (and profitability gap) with the technology at Conservative-2 minus at Optimistic-2, everything else at Reference. A technology a scenario does not build moves nothing.

Read more in the report§5.5 Generation and capacity costs (p.80)§5.6.4 Market profitability (p.90)§4.3 Overview of cost assumptions (p.50)Appendix D Technology cost assumptions (p.155)