U.S. Energy Information Administration

Levelized Costs of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2026

EIA's estimates of the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) and of storage (LCOS) for new power plants entering service in 2031 in the AEO2026 Counterfactual Baseline case, in 2025 dollars per megawatt-hour: advanced nuclear, biomass, natural gas combined-cycle with and without carbon capture, geothermal, offshore and onshore wind, hydroelectric, solar photovoltaic (standalone and with a battery), combustion turbines and battery storage. Each is given as a simple average of the 25 US electricity supply regions and, where new capacity is built in 2031, a capacity-weighted average; with the regional minimum and maximum; before tax credits ("Total system LCOE") and including the levelised tax credit and the 45Q captured-carbon credit as modified by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. Laws and regulations effective as of December 2025 only. These are model projections of the cost to build and run a plant, not of the value of its output to the grid (EIA pairs them with the levelised avoided cost, LACE), and plants run at different capacity factors (combined-cycle 40%, with carbon capture 87%).

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Numbers published from it

Cost of electricity from new US power plants coming online in 2031 (EIA)

Licence and credit

Licence: Public domain (work of the US federal government)
What the terms say: “U.S. government publications are in the public domain and are not subject to copyright protection. You may use and/or distribute any of our data, files, databases, reports, graphs, charts, and other information products that are on our website or that you receive through our email distribution service.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-08; re-checked automatically every week.
Credit we give: Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (Apr 2026).
Copy of the raw file: Allowed: we keep a public copy of every version we use.
Cite as: Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (Apr 2026).

Files

LCOE-LCOS-LACE_figures.xlsx, the data behind the report's figures, nine sheets. Read: "lcoe-components" (average LCOE and LCOS by component, before and including tax credits, with capacity factors) and "lcoe-regional" (regional minimum, simple average, capacity-weighted average and maximum, without and with tax credits).
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/xls/LCOE-LCOS-LACE_figures.xlsx
The report (15 slides). Page 8 labels each technology's average LCOE including tax credits, which the build checks against the workbook; page 3 states the cost recovery period and WACC; page 6 the warning against direct comparisons across technologies.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/LCOE_report.pdf

Status

Programme: AEO2026 was published in April 2026. EIA lost more than 100 of its about 350 staff in 2025 and cancelled the 2025 International Energy Outlook (see eia-international); every pull is archived.
Updates: Annual, with each Annual Energy Outlook (spring)
Next release: 2027-05-31: No date announced for AEO2027. AEO2026 appeared in April 2026; 31 May 2027 is the date by which to check, not an announced date. A new edition overwrites the same file names.
Last check: Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-25T10:11:42Z)
Independent sources measuring the same thing: Electricity Generation Costs 2025