It is a lie that solar and wind power are cheaper than fossil fuels. They are not close to as inexpensive. Advocates ignore subsidies, grid update costs, decommissioning costs, the cost of backup power when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, which is often. A post by Paul Homewood specifically compares the cost of offshore wind versus gas in Great Britain, noting many of the additional costs which advocates ignore. In the US the cost difference would be even more extreme, given how much cheap gas we have in this country and given the regulatory costs imposed upon even favorable sources like wind. Your electric bills are going up by double digit percents every year for a reason–renewables are not low-cost, they are high cost. But don’t worry, all the subsidies make rich people even richer. (PH Post)
The True Cost of Renewable Energy
About this Blog
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.
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Keep sharing the truth!
Climate Etc has had numerous excellent posts regarding integration of renewables into the grid
https://judithcurry.com/2024/12/05/wind-and-solar-cant-support-the-grid/
https://judithcurry.com/2022/10/03/the-penetration-problem-part-i-wind-and-solar-the-more-you-do-the-harder-it-gets/
Several more links throughout those posts.
Energy Information Association is probably to best sorce for raw data
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/
Read the 2022 report linked on the right side of the webpage.
A few of the key limitations of using LCOE in the EIA’s annual reports:
“In NEMS, we model battery storage in energy arbitrage applications where the storage technology provides energy to the grid during periods of high-cost generation and recharges during periods of lower cost generation, not as providing generation capacity reliability.”
“Actual plant investment decisions consider the specific technological and regional characteristics of a project, which involve many other factors not reflected in LCOE (or LCOS) values. One factor is the projected utilization rate, which depends on the varying amount of electricity required over time and the existing resource mix in an area where additional capacity is needed. A related factor is the capacity value, which depends on both the existing capacity mix and load characteristics in a region. Because load must be continuously balanced, generating units with the capability to vary output to follow demand (dispatchable technologies) generally have more value to a system than less flexible units that use intermittent resources to operate (resource-constrained technologies). We list the LCOE values for dispatchable and resource-constrained technologies separately because they require a careful comparison”
In other words, the EIA fully acknowledges that you can not compare demand limited generation (dispatchable- gas/coal/nuclear) with resource limited generation (wind /solar) because they are not even remotely alike and because they admit that the cost of reliability is not factored in.
Anyone touting renewables as “cheaper” simply doesnt understand the subject mater.