Integral labor costs for substantiation of hydropower construction alternatives

Abstract

The existing methods of substantiation of the effectiveness of hydropower construction alternatives have several shortcomings. Various authors [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] have pointed out the groundlessness of the applied rigid and unified norms of effectiveness and costs occurring at different times in the substantiation of lonE-term programs, the limitations of the criterion of amortized costs, which functions poorly in the evaluation of social and ecologic factors and the substantiation of tecrltorlal--lndustrlal complexes, the underestimating of the llve labor in the expenditures and capital investments for the considered alternatives, etc.These shortcomings exert a significant effect on the technical policies in the fleld of hydropower and multipurpose water-management construction, in whlch the differences among the compared alternatives as regards capital consumption, fund structure, construction and operatlonmastering periods, labor productivity level, and amount and composition of the productlon expenditures are usually very sharply manifested.Along with the topicality of the improvement of the methods of economic comparison of power coustruction alternatives, under the conditions of the increasing strain in the balance of the labor resources, considerable importance is attained by the working out of methods of comparison of alternatives directly from the labor costs. In this article, an investigation carried out for working out such methods is described.Proposals for comparison of labor in a natural form are presented in [8,9]. According to [8], the total labor costs can be determined in any given technical alternative by removing the total llve labor costs from the materially expressed labor costs through successive apportionment of the live labor costs over the previous production stages and their addition to the live labor costs for the last stage.Less labor-consuming is a proposal [9] for determination of the national income corresponding to each working day and addition, on the basis of this equivalent, of the past labor to the llve labor. The individual cost economy of importance for evaluation of the effectlvaness of the alternative can be calculated by taking into account the required design llve labor costs.The basic possibility of direct measurement of the labor costs is admitted also in [3], in which, however, the complexity of such calculations is pointed out.The conditionallty and approximate character of such methods of expressing labor in a natural form is perceived in the difficulties involved in adding labor time having different qualifications and intensity and in making commensurable the past labor expressed in production means and materials with the current live labor costs. These difficulties really exist, but, as shown below, they do not depreciate the method of analysis itself.