Assessment of the economic efficiency of hydropower facilities with their life cycle taken into account
Accelerating the use of renewable energy sources in Russia means to aware the society more about the technologies of renewable energy and to find the potential of the territories for renewable energy sources. The article presents the results of studying the hydropower potential of Chelyabinsk region, which is determined as 2.6 billion kWh for rivers and 200 million kWh for regulated flow. The comparative economic assessment of two variants of reconstruction for the Zyuratkul hydroelectric station with using the parameter of the levelized cost of energy to take into account the entire life cycle of hydropower facilities is given as an example. It was found out that mini-power hydroelectric stations with the capacity up to 5 MW are inefficient today, because the current costs per unit of energy produced are high