In the following considerations, the regions previously identified both within the EU and in the expansive surrounding areas have been examined with regard to the local costs of production. For certain distant locations, the expected transmission costs to the city of Kassel, which has been selected arbitrarily, have also been included. The costs are comprised of the capital investments in all components calculated at a real interest rate of 5%, the outlays for maintenance and repairs, as well as additional expenditures such as insurance and operating expenses.

• 5.1 Costs of Wind Energy

Wind turbines have been calculated using a specific cost of 1000 € per Kilowatt. The expected costs for offshore wind farms are currently about 1850 €/kW, whereby locations in the North Sea promise a yearly equivalent output of 3500 FLH (s. [Pla. 00], [SEAS 97] and [CHK 98]). An assumed turbine service life of 20 years is used to calculate the annuity, and the yearly operating costs are set at 2% of the total capital investment.

If the full potential of electricity generation from wind power in Germany were to be realized, an equivalent average generation of 1600 FLH with electricity costs of 6.3 €ct/kWh could be achieved according to the computational method mentioned above. The costs for electricity generated by offshore wind turbines may be estimated at 5 €ct/kWh. Equal distribution of wind power throughout all EU countries (according to the yield anticipated in [Gie 00]) would likely result in an average cost of about 5 €ct/kWh, as well. With the concentration on particularly good sites proposed above, about 3.7 €ct/kWh could be achieved. Tab. 3 gives the calculated local electricity costs for northern Russia with western Siberia, southern Morocco, Mauritania, and Kazakhstan as well as the transmission distances, costs, and losses. It should be noted that local measurements in southern Morocco [ER 99] clearly indicate the existence of sites capable of achieving 2.2 €ct/kWh locally, while the Egyptian sites previously mentioned promise generating costs of only 1.7 €ct/kWh owing to expectable yields above 6000 FLH. The transmission line losses would be greater because of the high level of output, but costs of delivered electricity below 3.5 €ct/kWh may be expected for the Moroccan high-yield sites and even less for Egyptian wind power reaching central Europe. If the electrical energy from Morocco were to be transmitted initially only as far as Spain, the cost would probably lie below 3 €ct/kWh. As soon as the high-yield predictions have been verified, wind energy imports from Kazakhstan could likewise be considered possible at costs of less than 4 €ct/kWh. Yet because of systematic underestimations, these particularly good sites are not represented in ECMWF data, which form the meteorological basis of the scenarios. They are consequently omitted in the scenarios and will be accorded no further discussion in this paper.

Tab. 3 Anticipated local average costs of electricity (EC) and at arbitrary delivery point Kassel (ECK) for electricity generation from: a) land-based wind turbines, b) solar thermal electricity production with heat storage for 14 FLH (With St.), c) as b), but at half the current costs for the solar mirror field (With St. % FC), d) as b), but without storage (No St.) and e) PV. The transmission losses (L) include consideration of grid load variations with time due to changing infeed and the transmission distance to Kassel (DK) together with converter losses for the conversion from AC to HVDC.