The costs of renewable energy-based electricity generation have fallen precipitously in recent years to levels that are increasingly competitive with traditional generation such as fossil fuelbased generation. As these costs become increasingly competitive, private developers, policymakers, and energy system planners are searching for opportunities to harness high-quality renewable energy resources. Developing economies are setting ambitious targets and exploring how cost-effective, grid-connected renewable energy options can help power economic growth and meet growing electricity demands. This includes the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that are determined to reach a target of 23% of renewable energy in the region's total primary energy supply by 2025. 1 A critical gap to identifying opportunities and scaling up renewable energy is the lack of quality data and analyses to support decisions on the investment and deployment of renewables-including wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) (ACE and IRENA 2016). This work supports decision making by providing high-quality data and spatial analysis of the cost of utility-scale wind and solar PV generation in select countries of Southeast Asiaspecifically, the ASEAN member states. Generation costs are expressed as the levelized cost of energy (LCOE)-a commonly used metric that represents the net present value of the unit cost of electricity during the lifetime of a particular electricity generation technology. This is the first spatial estimate of LCOE for these technologies within the ASEAN member states-providing insights into the roles that renewable energy resource quality and other factors may play in generation costs.

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With the exception of the magnitude and location of additional solar and wind generation in the high RE scenarios, which were determined based on guidance from the Technical Advisory Committee. b While the site selection approach attempts to select the best resources based upon annual energy production estimates, subject to land use restrictions and other site selection constraints, the method does not solve a mathematical program to optimize the selection of variable RE resources. Additionally, the site selection approach does not evaluate the efficient resource quantity, in absolute terms or relative to existing resources, required to meet system requirements.

Greening the Grid provides technical assistance to energy system planners, regulators, and grid operators to overcome challenges associated with integrating variable renewable energy into the grid.