from an economic point of view it would be entirely correct to internalise gridlevel system costs into the plantlevel levelised cost of electricity production in order to derive the true economic cost to society of different technologies and to enable policymakers to make leastcost choices maximising social wellbeing while estimates of the capacity credit of variable renewables their ability to fully substitute for dispatchable capacity vary widely and depend heavily on local circumstances they rarely exceed of total capacity and decline with rising shares of variable renewables in electricity production estimating the costs of such backup capacity is less straightforward than it seems