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Capital costs, plant efficiencies and operating and maintenance costs for the chosen technologies are given in Table 1.

Initial cost data was sourced from the "Annual Energy Outlook 2001" prepared by the American Energy Information Administration (EIA). This data was adjusted for New Zealand conditions where possible. The adjustment procedure is outlined in Appendix B, with all costs adjusted to New Zealand dollars as at September 2001. The costs are indicative only and individual plant costs will vary according to the site, special conditions and constraints. Typical plant sizes have been chosen.

Points to note:

• Capital costs, efficiencies and operating and maintenance (O&M) costs for fluidised bed plant are assessed to be the same as those for conventional pulverised coal steam plant with flue gas desulphurisation (FGD). For this reason, it has not been separately listed in the following tables.
• The output and efficiencies quoted for gas-fired plant apply for a natural gas fuel. Natural gas firing gives a slightly higher output than distillate firing by about 2% for a given gas turbine. The efficiency is also slightly higher by about 4% when burning gas, i.e. multiply the efficiency given in the text for gas firing by 0.96 to obtain the efficiency when firing distillate.
• Distributed generation has been included. Even though the unit size is small there could be sufficient numbers of units to make a significant contribution.
• The specific capital costs generally apply to plant that is close to the size of plant quoted. Scaling factors for different sized plant are given in Appendix C.

Table 1: Current Power Station Capital, Operating and Maintenance Costs, and Efficiency

¹Costs are in September 2001 New Zealand dollars

²Costs are in September 2001 New Zealand dollars.

³Fluidised bed plant has similar capital and O&M costs to pulverised coal plant with FGD

⁴For a pulverised coal plant without FGD deduct $416/kW from the capital cost.

⁵Fuel costs need to be below $8.7/GJ to keep electricity costs below 15c/kWh.