NEA-1675 PPICA.

1. NAME OR DESIGNATION OF PROGRAM:  PPICA (Power Plant Investment Cost Analysis).

3. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM OR FUNCTION

This software package contains two modules:

- CAPITAL1 calculates investment costs from overnight costs, based on the capital structure of the utility (debt/equity ratio), return and interest rates according to the type of securities involved, and a standard-shaped curve of capital outlays during construction of a power plant.

- FCRATE1 calculates the year-by-year revenue requirements to cover the capital-related charges incurred by the new investment and their economic equivalent: the levelised fixed-charge rate and capital contribution to the levelised unit power generation cost per kWh.

They are proposed as an alternative to the corresponding modules CAPITAL and FCRATE, included in the LPGC (Levelised Power Generation Cost) suite of codes developed by ORNL and US-DOE.

They perform the same type of analysis and provide the same results.

4. METHODS

Results output from CAPITAL1, in terms of the initial investment at startup and the fraction thereof that is allowable for tax depreciation, can be transferred automatically as data input to FCRATE1.  Other user-defined data are: the project life, the time horizon of the economic analysis (which does not necessarily coincide with the project life), the plant load factor (lifetime average), the tax rate applicable to utility's income, the tax depreciation scheme and the tax charge accounting method (normalised or flow- through).

The results of CAPITAL1 and FCRATE1 are expressed both in current money and in constant money of a reference year.  Inflation rate and escalation rate of construction expenditures during construction period, and of fixed charges during service life are defined by the user.  The discount rate is set automatically by the programme, equal to the weighted average tax-adjusted cost of money.

5. RESTRICTIONS ON THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM

CAPITAL1 and FCRATE1 are *alternatives*, not *substitutes*, to the corresponding programs CAPITAL and FCRATE of the LPGC package.  The file names have been changed on purpose to avoid messing up normal LPGC operation, so that they can be placed in the same directory as LPGC without any disturbance.  However, the new versions of these two modules are not designed to run in conjunction with the original LPGC modules.  It means that other contributions to power cost, i.e., operating and maintenance costs and fuel costs, must be computed separately, then added to the capital costs in order to evaluate the complete cost of electricity generation.

6. TYPICAL RUNNING TIME

It is an interactive program. The answer was immediate with the examples ran during the test.

8. RELATED OR AUXILIARY PROGRAMS

The QuickBasic runtime module BRUN40 by Microsoft Corporation is needed to be able to run this software. (Included in the  package.)

LPGC (Levelised Power GenerationCost) suite of codes developed by ORNL and US-DOE, distributed as a separate package by the OECD-NEA Data Bank with number NESC9449/01.

10. REFERENCES

The computing algorithm is modelled after the report

- DOE/NE -- 0095:  'Nuclear Energy Cost Data Base - A Reference Data Base for Nuclear and Coal-fired Power Plant Power Generation Cost Analysis' by J.G. Delene, K.A. Williams, B.H. Shapiro

published September 1998 by the U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant
Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Office of Program Support.

README.TXT, Author information file

11. HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:  MAIN STORAGE on the PC: about 250 Kbytes

13. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:  DOS 2.1 or later.

15. NAME AND ESTABLISHMENT OF AUTHORS

      J.-C. LEFEVRE
      Framatome-ANP / NV
      10 rue Juliette Recamier
      F - 69456 LYON CEDEX 06

      phone: (33) 4 72 74 70 22
        fax: (33) 4 72 74 72 76
      email: jeanclaude.lefevre@framatome-anp.com

PPICA.inf  information file
Readme.txt  Author information file
Brun40.exe  QuickBasic runtime module from MS
Capital1.bas  Source code
Capital1.exe  Executable
Capitalc.res  Output of CAPITAL1.EXE for the DOE reference coal-fired power plant
Capitaln.res  Output of CAPITAL1.EXE for the DOE reference nuclear power plant
Data_in1.bas  Source code
Data_in1.exe  Executable
Data_in2.bas  Source code
Data_in2.exe  Executable
Fcrate1.bas  Source code
Fcrate1.exe  Executable
Fcrate_c.res  Output of FCRATE1.EXE for the DOE reference coal-fired power plant.
Fcrate_n.res  Output of FCRATE1.EXE for the DOE reference nuclear power plant