“Misinformation” — It has been one of the most-used buzzwords of the past few years. The “misinformation” label has been applied by advocates on both sides of the political divide in the attempt to discredit their opponents. Numerous assertions that have dominated the news cycle for months or even years have ultimately proven to be completely false, that is, “misinformation.” Examples of such assertions that have been established as “misinformation” include the assertion that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election; the assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian plant; and the assertion that the Covid virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
After the thorough discrediting of so many false narratives during these years, there remain plenty of narratives still out there that richly deserve the “misinformation” label. But of those, which is the very worst, the very most pernicious? Here is my candidate: the assertion that the cheapest way to generate electricity today is with wind and solar generators.
I recognize that there are many candidates for the title of the worst of all misinformation, and we are dealing here with a very crowded field. Numerous other endlessly-repeated false assertions contend for the title, many of them having very large real-world consequences. For example, other serious contenders for the title of “most pernicious misinformation” could include the assertion that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases constitute a danger to human health and welfare; or the assertion that Israel is conducting a “genocide” against Palestinians. Undoubtedly, you have other candidates to add to the list.
So why do I say that the assertion of wind and solar being the cheapest ways to generate electricity is the very most pernicious of misinformation currently out there? Here are my three reasons: (1) the assertion is repeated endlessly and ubiquitously, (2) it is the basis for the misallocation of trillions of dollars of resources and for great impoverishment of billions of people around the world, and (3) it is false to the point of being preposterous, an insult to everyone’s intelligence, yet rarely challenged.
How ubiquitous is the assertion that wind and solar are the cheapest ways to generate electricity? Try Googling the question “What is the cheapest way to produce electricity?” You will get multiple pages of results advocating for wind and solar electricity, with almost no mention of the problems or costs of intermittency. A few examples of what turns up:
- The top result from Galooli.com, March 13, 2022, “Which Renewable Energy is Cheapest? A Guide to Cost and Efficiency”: “According to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook and other research projects, solar and wind energy have continued to occupy the top spots in terms of the cheapest renewable energy sources. Both energy sources cost significantly less than fossil fuel alternatives and continue to become more affordable every year.”
- Next up, decarbonization.com, August 2, 2023, “Ranked: The Cheapest Sources of Electricity in the U.S.”: “According to Lazard’s 2023 analysis of unsubsidized LCOE in the U.S., both onshore wind and utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies are more cost-effective than combined cycle natural gas power plants. In the case of onshore wind, this has been true since 2015.”
- Next, carbonbrief.com, October 13, 2020, “Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA.”: “The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries. That is according to the International Energy Agency. . . .”
Keep going for dozens of these for page after page. Try to find in any of them a serious discussion of the costs of backup, storage, or transmission upgrades to try to make an electrical grid work with these intermittent generators. You won’t. And don’t think that the high-brow mainstream sources can be trusted for anything better. Here is the New York Times from August 17, 2023: “The cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is falling fast and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal.”
In the face of hundreds of different journalism outlets endlessly repeating in unison the mantra of cheap “renewable” electricity, it becomes difficult to blame the voters or the politicians for just nodding along with the crowd. Why do any mentally taxing independent thinking when everybody seems to be saying the same thing?
The problem is that the idea that wind and solar make the cheapest electricity is plain wrong. At least, it is plain wrong if the electricity you are talking about is the reliable sort that works whenever you want to turn on the switch. The idea that wind and solar are cheapest fails to take account of any of the ancillary costs necessary to make a fully-functioning grid: the entire system of backup facilities to provide the power when the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining; the transmission facilities to take the power from wherever is windy or sunny to anywhere else it may be needed on a moment’s notice; the batteries or other storage facilities to save up energy in anticipation of inevitable wind and solar droughts; and so forth. In short, the idea that wind and solar generation of electricity are the “cheapest” is classic misinformation, the endless repetition of an assertion that is clearly false and known to be false.
Meanwhile, among the people incapable of seeing through the fog of misinformation on this subject are our current President, and the Governors of New York and California. In the case of the states, they throw tens of billions of dollars of handouts and subsidies to develop wind and solar facilities (hundreds of billions of dollars in the case of the feds), never having the presence of mind to realize that none of that would be necessary of this method of generation were actually cheaper as claimed.
Between the vast mis-allocation of resources and the sheer preposterousness of the proposition in question, I think that this assertion of wind and solar electricity generation being “cheapest” definitely has the claim for the number one spot.
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If the “renewables” industry really believed their claim that renewables are now the cheapest form of electric power generation, then they’d be okay with ending the mandates and subsidies which prop up their industry. Instead, they clammer for MORE mandates and subsidies.
That shows they don’t really believe their lies. They know they cannot compete on an even playing field.
Wind and solar cannot replace fossil fuels and nuclear because solar & wind fail completely every windless night. Even Bill Gates understands that problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xe3BWPsBTU
Reliance on wind & solar energy means freezing in the dark on windless winter nights.
And there are a lot of windless nights. That’s because wind energy is actually a form of solar energy. It’s temperature differentials (and to some extent evaporation) caused by solar heating which cause wind. That’s why the wind tends to die at sunset, and why you shouldn’t expect wind energy to take up the slack when solar generation quits at sunset.
The claim that renewables produce energy more cheaply than dispatchable fossil fuel & nuclear plants is an attempt to confuse people by conflating the low PRICES which renewable energy fetches with its COST. The low prices it fetches reflect its LOW VALUE, not low COST.
There’s value in reliability. The low value of renewable (wind & solar) energy is because it is unreliable.
The high total cost of renewable energy is also because it’s unreliable. Its intermittency causes shortages, which cause price spikes, which are an unavoidable cost of increased reliance on wind & solar.
Dispatchable electric energy from fossil fuels and nuclear fetches high prices because of its HIGH VALUE, because it’s available when needed, including when market prices for energy are high. (And often the reason those prices are high is because wind and solar are unavailable.)
My opinion is that “there is a climate emergency”. is more pernicious than “renewables are cheap”.
The latter is a subset of the former. Without the climate emergency, a whole lot of sanity emerges.
If the climate emergency is removed then the urgency disappears. It removes the need for UN administered Climate Ambition™ and leaves free markets to decide outcomes.
Also the climate emergency has been the scapegoat for countless jurisdictions spending money on pointless and wasteful projects as well as linking every administrative failure of said jurisdictions to the climate emergency. For example, when there is a downpour that causes havoc they can blame it on the climate emergency then point out they are taking their own small steps to addressthe emergency (by buying EVs etc) rather than the more immediate fix of clearing debris from drains.
As more power grids suffer serious outages, it will be blamed on the Climate Emergency rather than the stupidity of building weather-dependent grids. The obvious flaw would be immediately identified if the aptly term “weather-dependent generators” was used instead of the inappropriate “renewable generator”.
Sceptics have wasted a huge amount of time arguing over the accuracy of temperature measurement. Climate change is the only constant. A 1.5C increase in temperature is inconsequential. When that figure is history it means the clueless climate clowns will need to raise the stakes. When 2C goes by and the climate is nocyiceably improved they will raise the stakes and by the time 2.5C is in the rear vision, the ice will be accumulating.
The global average air temperature is a meaningless number that cannot tell anything about “the climate”.
If wind and solar are the cheapest ways of generating electricity, why hasn’t most of the world caught on and replaced fossil fuels with them on a more widespread basis? As it is, don’t wind and solar still provide under 10% of global primary energy sources. So what’s everyone waiting for and why haven’t they gone whole hog in the adoption of these technologies, or are they in the same class as EVs; i.e., they work best on paper but not in practice.
Whenever I hear someone make the claim that solar and wind have the lowest cost for generating electricity I ask them to name one city, state, or country where addition of wind or solar has resulted in lower cost to consumers.
I was thinking about this while waiting to see the dentist this morning.
Renewables are free, fossil fuels are free the cost is getting them to you in a form you can use.
Water is also free, in the UK it falls from the sky 200+ days a year on average in some places. Again the cost is getting it to the consumer in a usable form. Something that the water companies can fail at. However what is very visible is how water companies cope with variations in supply, mainly droughts but also over supply. There are very visible storage facilities across most of the UK and even these can be insufficient every 20 years or so.
What’s laughingly called renewable energy is eactly the same as water except we haven’t built and can’t afford to build by 2050 any reservoirs
That planet-destroying carbon dioxide comes only from Western nations, not China, India, Russia, the Philippines, OPEC countries, etc.
Because it’s Capitalist CO2 no doubt. /sarc
The mass media always support political misinformation which supports one particular group only and always attacks their opponents. This particular group is the same one that claims we should sterilize and mutilate our children before they are old enough to realize they will then NEVER be able to have normal human lives IF they so choose. They will never even be able to enjoy normal sex. This is a group that claims that zero CO2 is their goal although it is absolutely required for photosynthesis, which is the basis for feeding ALL life on earth. The propaganda is so successful, and our science schooling so useless, that the voting masses accept their scam. This is also the group who frantically pushed the lies that the “vaccination” was safe and effective when they KNEW it was not. Among this group are people who use Marxists and Marxism to manipulate and dupe people, to establish a world dictatorship. We need to be connecting the dots, as they are becoming pixels in a very disturbing picture.
The media and academia are down playing the benefits of CO2 greening of the earth