Before you read on, its important to note that there are many factors that help determine the final cost of electricity to the consumer (called the “levelized cost of electricity,” or LCOE), and that many of them are difficult to predict and vary widely from region to region. A global investment bank called Lazard for years has stewarded a methodology for estimating the LCOE for different energy sources based on a number of factors that include the cost of manufacture of the components and equipment, fuel costs, cost of capital, government incentives, land and water requirements, and electricity dispatch characteristics (i.e. the dynamics of integrating the technology into the dynamic bid process of marketing electrons to distributors on the grid).