Toward global comparability in renewable energy procurement

Procurement prices are increasingly used to gauge the financial performance and costs of renewable energy projects. Comparing procurement prices from auctions or contracts at their face value alone is rarely adequate across different jurisdictions and time horizons. This often results in misleading conclusions. We employ a holistic approach to capture all relevant project revenue and value elements and apply it to eight global offshore wind projects. In a like-for-like comparison, we find significant variation in absolute levels and relative composition of project revenue and value streams. This confirms that our developed metric is useful to establish comparability. Our findings also emphasize the continued importance of support regimes, even when subsidy payments are nonexistent. With sufficient data available, our approach enables global like-for-like comparisons of renewable energy procurement prices and can inform and supplement established cost metrics.