ORC Power Plants for Thermal Energy Harvesting - Aspects related to Policy, Finance

The white paper describes that in general terms, the higher the temperature of the energy source and the larger the amount of energy, the more economically attractive the conversion of otherwise wasted thermal energy into electricity by means of ORC technology. [...] In the first case, the business case is estimated through avoided costs (the difference between the costs of the electricity generated by the ORC system and the same electricity imported from the grid). [...] As all business cases have positive NPV’s, from the perspective of the ORC user, the abatement costs are negative, and the investments are therefore, at the lower end of the merit order of the marginal abatement costs curve. [...] The higher the temperature of the heat source, the higher the specific thermal energy available14, and the higher the fraction of this energy that could potentially be converted into electricity. [...] — The electricity price is the price per MWh that the user of the ORC system would have to pay if the electricity generated by the ORC unit had been purchased from the grid; these are the marginal costs, including taxes and grid costs.