Accounting for Fuel Price Risk: Using Forward Natural Gas Prices Instead of Gas Price Forecasts to Compare Renewable to Natural Gas-Fired Generation

摘要

Against the backdrop of increasingly volatile natural gas prices, renewable energy resources, which by their nature are immune to natural gas fuel price risk, provide a real economic benefit. Unlike many contracts for natural gas-fired generation, renewable generation is typically sold under fixed-price contracts. Assuming that electricity consumers value long-term price stability, a utility or other retail electricity supplier that is looking to expand its resource portfolio (or a policymaker interested in evaluating different resource options) should therefore compare the cost of fixed-price renewable generation to the hedged or guaranteed cost of new natural gasfired generation, rather than to projected costs based on uncertain gas price forecasts. To do otherwise would be to compare apples to oranges: by their nature, renewable resources carry no natural gas fuel price risk, and if the market values that attribute, then the most appropriate comparison is to the hedged cost of natural gas-fired generation.