Essay by Eric Worrall
Watch out for big oil saboteurs, who are more interested in pumping oil than making money.
AUGUST 20, 2025
Inflexion Point: Renewable Energy Is Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels
The tipping point between renewable energy and fossil fuels has been reached, says a new United Nations (UN) report. The UN Secretary-General Antônio Guterres said that we are entering a renewable era and leaving the era of fossil fuels. According to the report, ‘In 2024, renewables made up 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions and 74% of electricity generation growth’. While almost the entire world has increasingly switched to renewables, the United States stands out as the sole ‘dissident’, with the Trump administration denying climate change and still backing fossil fuels.
…
The long-talked-about renewable transition is finally here! The question is, do we have the political will to do what is not only necessary in climate terms but also economically a better option for all of us? Or will the old fossil lobby, particularly in the US, sabotage humanity’s transition to a low-carbon future?
…Not surprisingly, an analysis—Li, M., Trencher, G., & Asuka, J., Feb 16, 2022, PLOS ONE —of their business activities shows, ‘a continuing business model dependence on fossil fuels…We thus conclude that the transition to clean energy business models is not occurring, since the magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse’. In other words, oil companies are continuing with their business as usual under the cloak of carbon capture, grey hydrogen, etc., along with a lot of hot air. Incidentally, these four companies alone are responsible for 10% of all global warming in the world since 1965.
…The only country acting as the spoiler is the United States, which, though it is no longer competitive in manufacturing, believes that it can extract ‘rent’ from others. This is the new G1’s ‘Trump-based world order’, instead of the G7’s so-called ‘rule-based world order’.
Read more: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/20/inflexion-point-renewable-energy-is-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels/
What about that cited UN report?
Seizing the moment of opportunity
Supercharging the new energy era of renewables, efficiency, and electrification
…
Executive summary
…
The plummeting costs mean that solar and wind have become the fastest growing sources of electricity in history, and growth in renewable energy is now outpacing that in fossil fuels in the power sector. In 2024, renewables made up 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions and 74% of electricity generation growth. Between 2015 and 2024, global annual electricity capacity of renewables increased by around 2,600 gigawatts (GW) (140%), while that of fossil fuels increased by around 640 GW (16%). Consequently, the shares of fossil fuels and renewables in global installed electricity capacity now stand at almost 1:1. In terms of global annual electricity generation, renewables increased by 4,470 terawatt- hours (TWh) (81%), while fossil fuels increased by 2,150 TWh (13%). Meanwhile, the sales of EVs have increased by 3,300%, from 0.5 million (1% of all car sales) in 2015 to over 17 million (>20% of all car sales) in 2024. Experts believe that solar, wind, and EVs have irreversibly crossed a positive tipping point and entered a virtuous cycle of cost decline and widespread adoption.
…
Despite this, renewable energy is not replacing fossil fuels in energy systems at the pace and scale needed. To enable all countries to seize the benefits of the emerging clean energy economy, structural barriers and major challenges will need to be overcome. These include: developing enabling policy and regulatory frameworks that provide a level playing field for clean energy; prioritizing modernization and expansion of critical enabling energy infrastructure such as grids and storage; enhancing the resilience and diversity of clean energy supply chains; increasing the availability, accessibility, and affordability of energy-transition finance for developing economies; and addressing political resistance from vested fossil fuel interests
…
Read more: https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un-energy-transition-report_2025.pdf
So let’s see if I have this right.
We have a record breaking tipping point which although on a par with fossil fuel energy production is not replacing fossil fuel, because governments aren’t providing enough “enabling policies” like battery storage, and there is a risk political resistance from oil companies will sabotage the unstoppable renewable revolution because they are more interested in pumping oil than making money.
Riiight.
That seems believable, yes?
I guess it would be rude to ask questions like “if you add the cost of battery storage and grid upgrades and maintenance, are renewables still the cheapest option”? Because if renewables were still the cheapest option when all the enabling infrastructure has been added to the ledger, there would be no need for “enabling policies” and special government “energy-transition finance”.
That phrase never precedes anything but gibbering word-salad.
He is easily one of the most irritating people on the planet — like a combination of JB Pritzker, John Kerry, and Bill McKibben.
…but he has such a vivid imagination. 😉
The only reason Renewables are SOOOO cheap they need subsidies is that, on their own, they’re WORTHLESS!
The boiling oceans are deep-frying his brain.
Hey ? Frying is done in oil, not water.. that’s called broiling. 😉
I’ve fried electronics. No oil involved.
The UN Secretary-General Antônio Guterres said, ‘In 2024, renewables made up 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions’.
Yes But what is 25% of 92.5%; More like 23% of actual electrical energy production, less all the fossil fuel required to produce this energy source boondoggle.
Right up there with “Scientists say;….”
“if you add the cost of battery storage and grid upgrades and maintenance…”
It’s even a bit more than this because each time one transitions from renewables to thermal generation because the renewables supply nothing there is the cost associated with heating the power plant again. Then as one transitions from thermal back to renewables because they are allowed priority dispatch, or even because their marginal cost including subsidies is lower, there is stranded heat in the thermal plants that goes into the dead state without doing useful work.
Battery storage doesn’t get a person away from this problem because of the round-trip inefficiencies in the charge/discharge cycle.
add in the cost of redundancy
Jacobson’s 100% renewable scheme (fraud) requires 5x gross capacity, and 1.5x actual capacity to make it his scheme to work (supposed to work). Though he uses average demand and average supply even though the use of “average” anything is the wrong metric when both production and supply are highly volitale
It’s like the statistician who drowned wading across a river that he knew was, on average, only four feet deep…
Can you add in, the cost of completely replacing the entire system every 15 years or so.
More like 5 for the batteries and 10 for WV. WTG need repairs, statistically, every 4.3 years.
And I suppose eliminating CO2 will prevent hail storms and tornados from trashing the WTG and WV farms.
/s
The claim the UN is making is that renewables are the cheapest option for new generation capacity. From the report: “Solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive — and the fastest —option for new electricity generation.”
So, yes, this will hold true no matter what the costs of external factors like storage and grid upgrades are.
They fail to meet the requirement of supply on demand. Many things are ‘least expensive.” That doesn’t make them useful.
Intermittency is not a fatal flaw, it’s just an engineering problem that’s already being addressed in multiple ways. It’s like you guys have zero faith in human ingenuity. Sad.
Oh dear, and you have a vivid imagination and zero practical understanding of what is possible. Very sad.
Erratic intermittency is the MAIN problem, and the lack of interia..
The more wind and solar, the more it costs to combat these problems and to stabilise the grid.
That is why every country that goes down the renewables slope, ends up with massive increases in the cost of electricity.
Those countries are also deliberately destroy habitats and their economies, and will have a huge clean-up job after the short life-span of these fake unreliable electricity non-supplies.
I hope they have plenty of landfill options. !
Oh, the bandaids are free, and applying them is free. It’s like you have zero faith in reality. Typical.
One way is to remove the intermittent device and run a stable, dispatchable system already developed by human ingenuity
Yup, and when the automobile was first invented we could have removed those from our streets and kept them nice and suitable for horses and buggies. All kinds of ways to stifle progress!
Fine, you don’t like cars. Get out and walk.
Which is what most people did in the age of horses. Horses were expensive to keep and required lots of room.
It’s hard to keep a dog in a downtown flat, can you imagine trying to keep a horse?
And the first automobiles were battery powered.
All kinds of ways to stifle progress!
A key assumption in your post is that WTG and SV generation are progress.
Those who do AJ’s thinking for him, have told him that wind and solar is progress. That’s good enough for him.
It really is funny how AJ actually believes that progress has to be forced on people.
Eliminating a system that works with one that doesn’t is the opposite of progress.
BTW, nobody had to force people to ride cars instead of horses. There were no subsidies nor government mandates.
You just made the case that they are not cheap. “Already being addressed” means they have to figure it out still. Any assumptions in the math behind this will require you to add at least 30% to the costs. Engineers never, ever, come in on budget.
Because this is a government endeavor where no one pays the price for being wrong, other than the consumer of course, you will need to add another 30%.
If you have the UNs math that would help. By math I mean to the nth degree in detail. Not cents per kWh and such. Detail. How did they derive this. Transportation costs. Capacity utilization. At the factory that makes the equipment. Rules in place that strongly discourages fossil fuel investments. Useful life. Mining cost. Time to get a mine up. Reliability factors. Including the 4 to 5 months backstop during winter when the sun doesn’t shine much because the days are shorter and the weather is colder … etc. etc. etc.
Im pretty certain about this. I have a very good friend who recently retired as the COO of one of the largest power companies in the Midwest. He laughs when he hears this. But oh well. The real world is no longer real.
JT – FWIW the increased costs properly accounting for the redundancy is 200%-400% instead of just 30%.
Engineers never, ever, come in on budget.
I am offended. I am an engineer and I have come in under budget on multiple occasions. Granted it had nothing to do with energy generation or distributions.
The reality is that political programs never come in on budget.
The Engineer’s Poem
I am not allowed to drive the train.
The whistle I can’t blow.
I am not allowed to say how fast
The railway cars will go.
I am not allowed to blow off steam
Or even clang the bell.
But let the damned thing jump the tracks
And see who catches hell.
All of your other points are spot on.
What a marvelous piece of complete nonsense from you.
“Intermittency is not a fatal flaw, it’s just an engineering problem”
This is like you saying “the surgical operation was a complete success. Unfortunately the patient died on the operating table.”
Intermittency IS the problem, you utter dolt. And it has no useful solution.
I had difficulty believing that anyone could be more stupid than Mr. Fake ID Nick Stokes. But you found a way. Congratulations, you win the Dimwit of the Month award.
I love the way folks say “… it’s just an engineering problem …”.
Retired_Engineer_Jim
Reply to
AlanJ
August 21, 2025 10:39 pm
I love the way folks say “… it’s just an engineering problem …”.
As others have stated, its easy to solve the engineering problem when you dont understand the problem.
Yes. Unfortunately, the solutions to “engineering problems” have to obey the laws of Thermodynamics and Physics, instead of “then a miracle occurs.”
It’s easy to get hysterical and overstate the challenge when you can’t comprehend it as well.
In terms of CO2, there are no problems, so nothing to solve.
In terms of wind and solar the solution simple. Stop using them.
Everybody will be better off and energy prices will drop precipitously.
The ones who say that usually have no knowledge of math or engineering.
Alan,
as with my previous reply, simple arithmetic demonstrates the irrationality of that statement.
AlanJ
Reply to
cgh
August 21, 2025 11:19 am
Intermittency is not a fatal flaw, it’s just an engineering problem that’s already being addressed in multiple ways. ”
Yes – the intermittency is being addressed which requires high levels of redundancy. If you understood the actual math, you would know once the redundancy is properly factored in, the LCOE is 3x- 4x the advertised cost.
it’s just an engineering problem that’s already being addressed in multiple ways
Always like the “just an engineering problem” expression.
So, list the multiple ways.
For each option include the development time and costs, the deployment time and costs, the design reliability, manufacturability, the design efficiency, (size, weight, power), and the effectiveness of the design in addressing the root problem.
Also, how many of those multiple ways is ready to deploy today?
Intermittency is not a fatal flaw
Tell that to the people who died in Spain.
Your massive ignorance of economics is made clear in your fact and evidence free babblings; here is a report from the DOE showing that Wind Power is poor investment and that is causes grid AND economic instability that gets worse over time.
===
DOE Lab Finds Wind Output Plunges When Tax Credits End
Investor Warren Buffet once famously said: “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” A recent study by one of DOE’s premier National Labs seems to prove his point.
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory found that U.S. wind farms are producing less power after ten years of production because the loss of the federal production tax credit at the ten-year mark stops maintenance. The Department of Energy Laboratory study looks at how wind turbines across the United States degrade over time. The lab found that after the first 10 years of operation, wind turbines tended to experience an “abrupt decline” in performance that continued as time went on, despite being able to produce more electricity given wind conditions at a specific site. The study explains that since wind farms no longer have access to the production tax credit after ten years of operation, wind farm owners were making the financial decision to do less to protect against equipment wear and tear. After 17 years of operation, the lost energy was equivalent to losing 1 out of every 10 turbines in a wind farm. This finding should make policy makers examine the production tax credit construction carefully since it has many negative consequences—this finding by the laboratory is just one.
LINK
Mr. J: Your tender concern is noted.
You almost had me converted to the cause, but you lost me at “sad”. So close!
The claim doesn’t withstand any scrutiny.
True – if the measure is only the cost of generation, then wind and solar are less expensive.
However – it is total costs that matter. Adding the cost of redundancy, storage, transmission and costs of maintaining supply 24/7/365 and its easy to see that total costs are much higher for wind and solar.
As well as replacement costs at inflation increasing pricing since renewables don’t have the same shelf life as traditional FF generation
good point – most of the lcoe studies use estimated life of the equipment 5 or so years longer than actual for wind and solar while at the same time use estimated life for FF plants that is 5-10 years shorter than actual
It’s worse than that. Most LCOE studies assume that wind and solar will last for 30 years, when less thah 20 has been the norm.
Most LCOE studies assume a life span for FF at 30 years, when 50 to 60 has been the norm.
Subsidies and mandates, much?
Capacity.
Add 100 MW (note should be MWh) nameplate capacity that on a good day can generate 20 MW, it changes the ratios. So basing all on capacity added is bogus.
In fact, the mis-named renewables only account for 32% of electricity generated per the UN report up from 23% in 2015.
Looking at total energy, the mis-named renewables only account for 15% of the total energy produced, up from 12% in 2015..
All cost comparisons are made using the bogus LCOE and the grid instability is explained as due to increasingly severe weather impacts on the grid and infrastructure age.
This report was written by the Climate Action Team in the Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General.
I looked at the authors and references sources listed in that report and I walk away with even less trust in the UN being fair and unbiased.
What 4 companies?
The transition to ‘green’ energy is, simply put, impossible. There are not enough known reserves of the required materials to complete even the initial application, let alone any subsequent replacements as the machinery wears out. Dr Simon Michaux explains:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc
We cannot build sufficient ‘renewables’ to power the world. We cannot replace every vehicle on the planet with a battery powered equivalent, and in fact the end game is that none of us will be able to own a car. It is inconceivable that governments around the world are unaware of these issues, so why the continued push for the unachievable? None of this ‘net zero’ project is about the environment, it is about removing your freedom of movement and freedom of choice, to be replaced with small, brutal and short lives for the majority of us, whilst the politicians and elites continue with their excesses and we pay for it. The pursuit of a completely unachievable goal is harming the planet more than a miniscule increase in plant food in the atmosphere, with all the mining, refining and processing of the materials needed for the moronic belief that we can power the world with windmills, a blight on the landscape and responsible for the wholesale massacre of not only thousands of birds and bats, but insects by the trillion. Bees are not dying out because of “climate change”, you’ll find their remains in the sticky mess that coats wind turbine blades. It’s time to stop the daily bombardment of lies and propaganda we have been subjected to and face up to reality. It ain’t gonna happen.
It ain’t gonna happen.
Agreed.
It is the wrong path to the future.
It’s a path to the past.
Claims from the UN are almost universally WRONG. !!
You only have to listen to Gutty to know that they live in a weird, twisted, wacked-out fantasy la-la-land, totally divorced from any semblance of reality.
“Claims from the UN are
almostuniversally WRONG. !!”FIFY
What’s sad is that he actually seems to believe that it doesn’t matter what the external costs are, they don’t matter. At least they don’t matter to him. To people who have to pay for his delusions, they do matter.
And my weekly shopping costs are almost nothing, until you factor in the cost of rent, electricity, packaging, transport and staff wages. That food is almost free!
AJ reminds me of Hillary, when a reporter asked her how employers were going to afford the cost of Obama Care.
Her response was something along the lines of “Am I responsible for every under funded company in the country?”
That “new generation capacity” has to include the additional costs of grid upgrades, backup power generation, phase synchronization mitigation, and operational management / SCADA costs.
If it doesn’t also include those costs, it’s just so much Bovine Effluent.
In the real world, responsibility for new costs is borne by whoever caused those costs to be necessary.
If it’s necessary to upgrade the grid to support wind and solar, then those costs should be assigned to wind and solar.
If the addition of wind and solar means that there are new costs to deal with intermittency, then those costs also should be charged to wind and solar.
Generally speaking, if you leave out half the costs of an investment proposal, it will appear to show that it costs less than it really does.
Nick usually does this with an argument that takes one of the costs and claims that because its lower, the total system cost must be lower. So wind is free, the sun is free, therefore wind and solar must be cheaper than fossil fuel plants. Or, wind is free, therefore sail based freight must be cheaper than diesel powered freight. Maybe the wood for the hulls is also free? It just grows. Now that’s an inspiring thought! The whole thing may be free.
Wonder why anyone listens to those denialists promoting steel ships and diesel engines…
Your argument is LCOE. Lets build a wind farm off the north coast of Scotland, that’s where the wind is. Now lets take all the power it produces over its life, whether there is demand for it or not. How much does that cost? Why, its less than that gas plant we are considering in Birmingham where demand is.
But unfortunately it cannot be used without making the power dispatchable and transporting it to Birmingham over a new transmission network. So maybe its not cheaper?
Oh, it is, those are just ‘external factors like storage and grid upgrades’.
As if building a transmission network from Cape Wrath to Birmingham is a grid upgrade! When there is no reason to build it, were it not for our insistence.
Learn how to do cost accounting!
The US has been building its power grid since the 19th century, geared toward conventional fuels. If the argument you want to make is that we need to consider the cost of infrastructure development in the cost of new capacity, then feel free to do it. But be sure to account for the 100+ years of costs behind the current grid that have gone into supporting fossil fuels. The comparison will not be as favorable to FF as you seem to think it is.
And then, if you can, account for the external cost of the carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels support themselves.. and provide large revenues to governments.
The very opposite of wind and solar.
There is ZERO cost to CO2 emissions, they are totally BENEFICAL to the whole planet.
The whole of life depends on CO2, and it is in short supply in the atmosphere.
Hmmm… 100+ years. Years that the grid has been providing the electricity that people need, where they need it. Quite a good investment, it appears.
But building a grid to manage electricity from sources where it’s not needed, and generated when they don’t need it? That’s considerably more expensive! And all it’s supposed to do is replace existing infrastructure that already provides what is needed.
OK, comparison complete. I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions.
It’s supposed to be part of building out the new capacity to meet skyrocketing demand that the existing grid cannot possibly meet without significant upgrades.
What skyrocketing demand? AI centers have been talking about building FF power plants next to their centers. No grid enhancements needed there.
The only other massive increases are being caused by government demands that people start using electric cars and electric heating for their homes.
Get rid of that unneeded nonsense, then the only new costs are:
1) Extending the lines from where people are to where wind and solar are. Something that isn’t needed with fossil fuel plants can be built where the people are.
2) Providing power when the sun isn’t shinning and the wind isn’t blowing. Also not a problem with fossil fuel power.
Comprehension problems? The argument is about additional infrastructure. And “external cost of the carbon emissions from fossil fuels” only exist in your imagination.
Not only are there no “external costs” to carbon emissions, carbon emissions are a boon to mankind and the planet.
My suggestion, to learn how investment appraisal is done, is not an idle one. In this reply you’ve made one of the most basic howlers: you have tried to include sunk (none-cash) costs to assess an investment proposal.
When you are doing NPV analysis the only thing that you consider is cash flows of the project. The only thing.
If you are comparing building a gas plant in Birmingham with a wind farm in Cape Wrath, you have to list all the cash outlays which either one will incur and only those cash flows..
It may be that in Birmingham, as a for instance, the proposal is to build your gas plant on a site which previously held a coal fired plant. It would have grid connexions which can be re-used. Whereas in Cape Wrath there was green water and no connexions within a hundred miles. Or it may be that in Birmingham because the proposed plant is close to users the transmission spend required is minimal.
The effect is that cash out for the Birmingham gas plant is lower than that for the Cape Wrath plant, because it doesn’t need much or any transmission build. These are real cash costs of the Cape Wrath proposal, they are essential to delivering the required product. The differential is real too.
If you could build the Cape Wrath plant on the site of the former Birmingham coal plant, as you can the proposed gas plant, then you would not have to include the transmission costs, because you would not incur them and there would be no cash out for them. You would still have the cash out flows required to make the supply dispatchable. Those would still be costs of the wind proposal and not of the gas proposal.
Do it right, and the costs for delivering dispatchable power to the point of demand is far greater using wind and solar than using conventional technology. Offshore or on, doesn’t matter.
As I keep saying, this is not me making stuff up. This really is the way its done. I keep telling you and Nick to read Brealey and Myers. Or any other corporate finance textbook for that matter. You won’t, of course, because you both have this fantasy about being able to invent some new methodology which shows that wind and/or solar are cheaper despite its obviously not being that, in use.
But maybe some other readers will find the explanation and the reading suggestion helpful.
Should you consider the “external cost of the carbon emissions from fossil fuels”?
Yes. Not in the investment appraisal process, but when considering what to implement as a matter of public policy, then certainly. You might as government reasonably decide to take the more expensive proposal because of social or environmental considerations. But don’t try and use this to distort the task of assessing which is more expensive, and by how much.
The disagreement we will have here is on whether there are any such costs, how great they are, and whether they are any more for a gas plant than an offshore wind farm with all the plant required to make it deliver dispatchable power to the point of use. I don’t believe it. Never seen it shown.
And the way the UK is going is to try to move to Net Zero without making its power dispatchable. As it moves to 2030 and the futile quest for Net Zero in power generation, it is liable to experience one very large external economic and social cost: blackouts. That will dwarf all the others, politically and economically.
I’m not making an investment proposal, I’m making a cost comparison. The existing grid cost an awful lot to build out itself, and much of it is in desperate need of modernization whether you go renewables are stick with FF. Also, it goes without saying that there are more or less economically smart ways to build out grid infrastructure.
Except that the cost of conventional FF is not some abstract thing, it is real dollars and cents. You don’t want to consider it because it is debilitating to the FF case.
Correct.
But the costs of renewables as purported are NOT “real dollars and cents”, because they deliberately don’t include the “real dollars and cents” costs for massive taxpayer subsidies contributions, plus battery and / or gas make-up supply, plus thousands of miles of extra transmission lines to be built, plus interconnectors and grid stabilisation technologies to overcome the inherent unpredictable intermittency of wind & solar generated power supply.
Alan, if it helps you, I can get my 13 year old niece to explain the overall situation to you.
Kids have a way of seeing past what she terms “boomer bullshit” that some like you irrationally, ignorantly spout.
Actually, they do account for real dollars and cents. Every serious energy economics body, IEA, Lazard, BNEF, NREL, fully accounts for capex, O&M, fuel, financing, and lifetime cash flows. That’s why renewables beat new fossil on cost. You don’t get to pretend pipelines, fuel volatility, and massive fossil fuel subsidies don’t exist while droning on about ‘system costs.’
Gotta love that the most compelling case you can make for your position comes from a teenager. That tracks.
More ” boomer bullshit” from you, Al.
A deflection is a concession. I accept.
I’m not making an investment proposal, I’m making a cost comparison.
Oh dear, this is invincible willed ignorance. I will make one last attempt to explain this, but in the phrase ‘there are none so blind as those that will not see’.
You are making a financial comparison of two alternatives. To do this, there is only one correct method, it is to compare the Net Present Values of the two sets of cash flows.
You are, in doing this, and favoring one on the grounds of cost, actually making an investment proposal, but I don’t want to argue about how you characterize things. The point is that for what you yourself think you are doing, and how you yourself characterize it, Net Present Value analysis is the only right way to proceed.
You then say
Except that the cost of conventional FF is not some abstract thing, it is real dollars and cents. You don’t want to consider it because it is debilitating to the FF case.
The costs of a conventional FF system deployment are the cash flows it takes to deploy. Read about how to do NPV analysis if you want to argue about this.
Then you say I don’t want to consider the (presumably external) costs. This is nonsense, read my post again. I carefully explained how you do in fact take external costs into account.
I also don’t care one way or the other about FF, nuclear, fusion, hydro. I do care about doing the analysis correctly.
Once you know what the project costs are, when you have a valid comparison of them, that is when you take the policy decision whether the difference in cost is outweighed by policy considerations. As I said, it may be reasonable to take the more costly alternative based on them.
It may be more expensive to fly illegal immigrants to Rwanda than to house them in the UK. But you may decide that social peace and community cohesion make it the right decision, even so. Yes, I am being deliberately a little provocative here. To make the point clearly.
Do not however pretend that social cohesion is a cash flow. That is basic error #2 in NPV analysis – treating things that are not cash flows as if they were.
You are going through making all the classic errors in cost assessment one after the other.
You may decide for Cape Wrath even though it costs twice as much or more. Because of the effects on the global climate, if you can actually show there will be any, of the Birmingham gas installation as compared to it. Or there may be other external costs, maybe even intangible, which make it the correct policy decision.
But these costs are not project costs because they are not cash flows, and to repeat, when doing NPV analysis, all you consider is cash flows.
Get Brealey and Myers and read the first few chapters carefully. All the basic errors are clearly explained, along with the correct methodology.
You keep trying to box this into a private-investor NPV exercise, but that’s not the level the comparison is being made at. If you’re an investment firm choosing between projects, you only look at discounted cash flows. But when comparing technologies for a national grid, that framing is too narrow.
As I said, fossil fuel infrastructure looks cheaper today only because it was built out over the last century. Do the same build-out with renewables and you don’t just get a plant, you get near-zero marginal fuel costs for decades, which is why every serious levelized cost analysis shows renewables beating fossil: coal and gas carry permanent fuel costs, while wind and solar do not.
And fossil costs aren’t abstract ‘intangibles.’ They’re real fiscal burdens: higher health-care spending from air pollution, disaster recovery budgets, carbon pricing exposure, and ongoing fuel import bills. They may not show up on a single project’s balance sheet, but they absolutely show up in national accounts because taxpayers pay them either way.
That’s why institutions like the IEA, Lazard, and BNEF use system-level cost metrics, not just NPV of one developer’s project. If your analysis method consistently produces the opposite conclusion, it’s probably not because everyone else is doing it wrong and you’re the lone smartest guy on earth.
You keep trying to box this into a private-investor NPV exercise
No, I don’t. You keep claiming that renewables are cheaper. There is only one way to show this, and its not private or public.
As I said, fossil fuel infrastructure looks cheaper today only because it was built out over the last century. Do the same build-out with renewables and you don’t just get a plant, you get near-zero marginal fuel costs for decades, which is why every serious levelized cost analysis shows renewables beating fossil: coal and gas carry permanent fuel costs, while wind and solar do not.
The sunk costs fallacy yet again! The reason why FF projects are cheaper is that they benefit from sunk costs. That is true, the effect is to lower cash out for these projects. Yes, its a fact of life.
As for Lazard etc and LCOE, do LCOE properly, and you will end up doing NPV analysis. Have you ever looked at how LCOE is calculated? Notice that magical thing when they discount the cash flows? That’s NPV.
The only difference is, LCOE is NPV analysis with half the costs left out and the power production exaggerated.
Do the same build-out with renewables and you don’t just get a plant, you get near-zero marginal fuel costs for decades…
That is not a choice you have. The present grid is there. It does affect the cost of supplying power to demand. It makes it lower for some alternatives and higher for others. The choice you have is between using the present grid, with whatever additions more conventional requires. Or building lots more for the sole purpose of bringing your offshore wind to where its usable. And adding whatever is needed to make your wind and solar dispatchable.
To make your argument in a properly logical way it would have to go something like this. It would have to contend that running down the current conventional generating capacity and grid and incrementally replacing it with a new grid delivering W+S will be cheaper than the conventional alternative. Mainly because of lower fuel costs.
Fine, that’s what you think, make the case in quantitative form. Do the spreadsheet, list the plans behind it. Use the NPV function in your spreadsheet. No-one has done it.
And in the UK, where this is probably a more acute subject of discussion than anywhere else, because they are approaching the crunch at pace, all pretence that Net Zero is going to lead to lower prices is being abandoned. The consensus now, quiet but definite and from multiple sources, is that it will not lower prices at all, in fact, they will rise.
This by the way is an interesting UK indicator. Why, you may wonder, do we not just use the government estimate of the costs of net zero? Surely that would be the most robust way of doing this?
There isn’t one. The UK Governments of both parties have refused to say how much net zero will cost. In fact they deny having calculated it. Tell you anything?
Your framing is peculiar. You treat bickering over accounting as if it’s the real disagreement. I agree renewables show higher upfront costs, because the fossil grid was built out over the last century. That doesn’t mean renewables are ‘more expensive,’ it just means they haven’t had a century of sunk infrastructure poured into them yet. Give it a century, and it balances out.
But the point isn’t whether the transition is a quick cost win. The motive is halting rapid, dangerous climate change. The rest is engineering. We built the fossil grid; we’ll modernize it for renewables.
Boy are you ignorant.
and proud of it
“I’m not making an investment proposal, I’m making a cost comparison”
A difference that exists only in your pathetic excuse for a mind.
There are no external costs to FF, it’s all benefit.
And then, if you can, account for the external cost of the carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
Simple: $0.00.
The power grid did not support “fossil” fuels. The grid supported people who wanted and needed electricity. Coal and hydrocarbon fueled thermal generators were built in proximity to the consumers. That is not possible with WTG (land or sea) or SV farms, thus the infrastructure per joule delivers is much higher ($/mile) than what was first put in place.
So the comparison to thermal generation (coal and hydrocarbons) actually disfavors SV and WTG based on miles of transmission lines needed.
And that does not include the massive cost of sufficient energy storage to keep the lights on 24/7.
The few tenths of a degree extra warmth that CO2 have caused, is almost entirely beneficial.
The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is 100% beneficial to plants, including the ones that we, and the animals we eat, eat.
No increase in storminess.
No increase in droughts or floods.
No increase in wild fires.
A possible small increase in the amount of ice that has melted, no measurable impact on man or wildlife.
100% of the cost of that built up network was born by fossil fuel power providers.
100% of the cost of maintaining that grid is being born by ff power providers.
Now you want to charge the cost of building and maintaining support for wind and solar to ff providers.
That’s dishonest. Unfortunately, you aren’t smart enough to figure that out.
Blatantly untrue. The grid wasn’t built out of the generosity of fossil fuel companies, it was built and maintained by regulated utilities, funded by ratepayers and taxpayers, with guaranteed returns for the operators. Fossil fuels didn’t ‘pay for the grid,’ consumers did. And today, renewables also pay their share of interconnection and transmission just like any other generator.
Lies and personal insults are all you’ve got. Sad.
Funny how Alan actually seems to believe the lies he tells himself.
For the most part, the owners of the grid and the owners of the power plants were the same companies you low watt nincompoop.
Mr. J: Thanks for confirming, again, that you are a fool, rather than shutting up and leaving us to wonder. The grid must have been built before it was regulated- there was nothing to regulate! Further, consumers did not consume and pay for electricity before it existed (that is, before the grid provided it). Putting the cart before the horse seems to be all you got. Funny!
In Mr. J’s world, nothing happens unless some government agency commands it to happen.
In his mind, it makes perfect sense that the regulations must have come first. After all, how would engineers even know how to build a grid, unless the government regulators showed them how.
They are not. Not even close. They pile on cost of carbon metrics and the like. But you go ahead and live in that alternate reality. Silly. If they were the cheapest source oil companies would knocking themselves over to install them. At one time Shell was the largest investor in wind. When the subsidies dried up they dumped the investment. It’s simple accounting coming from an accountant. I’ve seen this too many times to count.
Well you better take that up with even Australian lefty science body that Nick Stokes used to work for
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2025/july/2024-25-gencost-final-report
Black coal is far cheaper but wait solar will be cheaper.
But wait like you in 2030 they project based on magic cost reductions and flying in the face of increasing costs that solar will magically become cheapest.
The very first key point in the report says, “The report found renewables remain the lowest-cost new-build electricity generation technology, while nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs) are the most costly.”
There’s a much simpler explanation. The report, like you, simply lies.
Only the summary is the LIE it doesn’t match the report at all it rolls on the use of the word “new”.
Good summary hey …. it’s a complete distortion AKA A BOLD FACED LIE.
If you read the report Black Coal is the cheapest it’s on the graphs if you can’t read. They project solar to be cheapest by 2030 … which is a big call 🙂
You wonder why nobody trusts them?
Now figure how they come up with that summary and the key is they use the word “new” which excludes coal and fossil fuels apparently being classed old technology. So lets rephrase the summary if you exclude all old generation FF/GAS/Coal and the contest is then between renewables and nuclear then renewables are cheaper. Doesn’t quite carry the same desired LIE FACTOR as there version.
It sucked you in, probably like a lot of people but that was obviously the intent.
And you continue to address only generation costs. Try thinking of the end-to-end system, collecting the energy with wind turbines or solar panels, storing any excess generation for those time when wind and solar fail, transmitting it to where people need it, conditioning the power to the form in which people use it, and delivering it the last mile (or kilometre). Then make sure that it is reliable and dispatchable. The cost is a great deal more than the cost of generation.
And what about energy uses other than electricity, or are you envisioning and all-electric world. If so, what will that cost?
It’s just a little bit of engineering.
AJ has been quite clear that he doesn’t care about end-to-end costs, since those don’t support the answer he wants.
Have you read the CSIRO report about what is NOT included in LCOOE? https://www.apsc.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/workforce-information/research-analysis-and-publications/state-service/state-service-report-2023-24/serving-community/snowy-20-delivering-next-generation-renewable-energy
The other thing of course is what you consider the price of renewables. Solar only, Onshore wind only, offshore wind only or a mix of them. You need to add what you want to come up with the final figure. 😉
Hmmm….
Lowest cost new build. Do they last as long as coal? Gas? Nuclear?
Oh, dear. It’s not taking longevity into account!
Is the electricity produced where it’s needed?
Oh dear, they haven’t taken additional infrastructure costs into account!
Is the electricity produced when it’s needed?
Oh dear, they haven’t taken the non-existent, ridiculously ruinous costs of storage into account!
Ooooops!
Modern wind and solar lifespans are comparable to gas and coal, and unlike fossils they don’t bleed money every year on fuel. Storage costs aren’t “ruinous,” they’re falling faster than any fossil fuel cost curve, and grids all over the world already integrate high shares of renewables without breaking. Infrastructure costs exist for every technology; gas needs pipelines and fuel import terminals, coal needs rail and ports, nuclear needs bespoke cooling and safety systems. Pretending those don’t count while inflating renewables’ costs is just special pleading.
And the lies pile upon lies.
Wind and solar last at best 20 years. FF plants usually last 60 years or more.
The cost of fuel is the smallest cost for FF.
What about taxes on the land needed? Wind and solar take up 20 to 100 times as much land as does FF. When you factor in both the low density of wind and solar as well as the pathetically low utilization factors.
Have you added in all the labor that is needed to keep wind and solar functional?
Whether you are too stupid, or too stubborn to recognize reality, is not a question I’m prepared to answer at this time.
Almost every line here is misleading. Modern wind and solar are designed for 25–30 year lifetimes, with repowering extending that further. Fossil plants only reach 50+ years with major, costly overhauls. Fuel is not a ‘small’ cost for FF; it’s the majority of lifetime cost, which is why gas and coal LCOEs remain high and volatile.
Land use comparisons ignore the fact that wind farms coexist with farming, and solar is increasingly dual-use. They also ignore the land, water, and waste footprint of mining, drilling, pipelines, and ash ponds for fossil fuels. And yes, renewables require O&M labor, but far less than the constant fuel and maintenance costs of fossil. That’s why every credible LCOE comparison finds new renewables cheaper.
Your entire viewpoint rests on a ridiculous notion that everything about fossil fuels is good, and everything about renewables is bad. Until you can wriggle your way out of this quagmire of inanity you wallow in, you’re going to find it hard to comprehend why better-informed people disagree with you.
New build does not include the cost of keeping it up and running for an equivalent time frame.
It also does not properly assess supplying the demand.
If it’s in a report, it must be correct. But only if the “report” is issued by a group you like.
All other reports are wrong.
Sweetheart, I didn’t cite the report, your compatriot did. And now you’re all dogpiling it. Get your stories straight together and stop bumbling around your arguments like buffoons.
Now you are simply LYING!
You are going to defend it no matter what because you are a wedded to the idea that wind and sunshine are free thus doesn’t cost much to get it……, LOL
Don’t expect AJ to think for himself. He knows what he wants to know and rejects everything else.
Alan,
the relevant word is ‘capacity’, and with capacity of renewables you need to factor how much power you get. U.K. figures, solar gives about 11% of capacity and wind on average about 35%.
This multiplying factor determine show much capacity you need to build, i.e. x 9 for solar and approximately x 3 for wind.
Still cheap?
Add the requirements for charging up the mythical, ruinously expensive, grid-scale batteries for the periods when no power is generated (which vary by region), and you’re getting into anything from 10x to 50x the existing generation capacity.
They also seem to ignore the cost of land.
You do know, don’t you, that Chinese solar manufacturers shed 87,000 jobs in 2024 and 40 solar companies in the country went bankrupt?. The industry in China has faced a downturn since 2023 and it is getting worse.
Reuters recently noted that the world is now producing twice as many solar panels each year than it actually uses. So production figures do not tell the true story.
Also in May this year Offshore Wind biz surveyed 166 stakeholders across the global floating wind value chain. They found that 63% were less optimistic about the future than a year earlier and now anticipate that less than 3GW of floating offshore wind will be operational by 2030.
China’s strategy has always been to deliberately overbuild solar capacity to crash prices and dominate the global market. And it worked: 92% of new capacity added last year was renewable, most of it with Chinese-made tech. The current shakeout is the natural consequence of that strategy, not a sign the industry is failing. Pretending Beijing didn’t anticipate this is, frankly, naive.
By contrast, the US under Trump is trying the opposite play: kneecap its own renewables sector while dumping cheap fossil fuel exports to keep the world hooked. One strategy builds dominance, the other clings to decline.
Short-term pessimism about floating offshore doesn’t change the broader trend. Fixed-bottom offshore wind is scaling fast today, and floating is a longer-term play. Every new tech has this curve: early hype, then a dip when costs and engineering challenges bite, and then rapid growth once deployment drives costs down. Nobody credible is saying offshore wind as a whole isn’t growing when 2023 alone saw record installations.
If you can’t get the juice to where it is needed, when it is needed, then “the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
Gawad you don’t know shit about investments as made clear in your comment howlers you made in the thread, let’s see what Billionaire Warren Buffet ($121 billion) thinks of wind power here is a man who knows how to make investments and see’s it through to the end for profitability while he made over $6 BILLION in tax breaks over wind power from just 3 year period 2019-2022 and still increasing his tax breaks return since then as explained in the link below.
He says Wind Power doesn’t make sense except for the extremely generous tax breaks that is the ONLY reason to build WindPower in his view.
Government backed wind and solar power policy are built as a SCAM!
========
Wind Power Doesn’t Make Sense: Berkshire Hathaway
Myths are an ever-present ingredient in promises made by the wind and solar energy industry. The magic can turn to farce when gullible media tries to make sense of it.
“NV Energy Assures No Loss of Solar Power During Eclipse,” promised the online headline attached to an October 2023 TV newscast from KTVN-2 in Reno, Nevada.
The station motto is “Coverage you can count on,” but don’t count on them getting an “A” in astronomy. As the video revealed, NVEnergy wasn’t really planning to move the moon out of the way. Instead, they used backup battery storage and natural gas power plants to make up for the missing sunlight.
NVEnergy’s parent firm is Berkshire Hathway Energy (BHE). A lot of BHE’s subsidized weather-dependent energy business makes as much sense as promising solar power without sunlight.
Berkshire Hathaway
Warren Buffett is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment conglomerate that controls BHE. As of December 2023, according to Bloomberg, Warren was worth $121 billion. But investing in firms that provide better stuff and services isn’t the only reason Berkshire built Buffett that big bank account.
“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” said Buffett in 2014. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
LINK
So your argument rests on some goofy anecdote where NV Energy accurately promised no loss of power during a solar eclipse and a dated remark from Warren Buffet in 2014? Pretty pathetic.
LOL, it is clear you didn’t read and think a combination you don’t much of here since making embarrassing economic claims.
No, he still stands by his position who you clearly ignored the source I posted which is why I am laughing at you as you are a mentally lazy person.
Buffet is making more money on the TAX BREAKS than he is selling the WindPower electric production as pointed out in the link you didn’t read that part I didn’t quote.
When the Tax break expires, he will quickly drop the investment to avoid future depreciation losses and the inevitable expensive repairs that exposes when they reach 10 years, it is why we have so many abandoned wind farms now.
You need to stop being a fool here.
I notice you ignored my other comment showing the DOE report about the risky investment of wind power and their rapid drop in performance by the time they are 10 years old that drives up maintenance costs shy high.
Pathetic of you to avoid it.
LINK
Let’s face it, AJ’s mind is 100% impervious to any fact that the party doesn’t want him to know.
Mr. W: My request to mods to “let Mr. J rip away, he’d hoist his petard” is aging well.
Lately he’s taken to just sniping and running away. Your request is aging well, but I’m not so sure about Mr. J.
“these four companies alone are responsible for 10% of all global warming in the world since 1965″
And that figure of 10% is exact- after all, the science says so. /s
Actually, not the science…. the UN says so.
Funny. I did not know that oil companies burned oil. I thought they sold it to hundreds of millions of people.
And oil does not cause global warming anyway…
… so the whole statement is a manifest LIE…
… like basically every other statement that comes from the mouthpieces of the UN.
““if you add the cost of battery storage and grid upgrades and maintenance, are renewables still the cheapest option”?”
And, let’s include ecosystem values lost by construction of green energy systems!
Dead marine life, dead raptors and bats, dead soil…
What’s not to like?
/s
“Not surprisingly, an analysis—Li, M., Trencher, G., & Asuka, J., Feb 16, 2022, PLOS ONE —of their business activities shows, ‘a continuing business model dependence on fossil fuels…We thus conclude that the transition to clean energy business models is not occurring, since the magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse’. In other words, oil companies are continuing with their business as usual under the cloak of carbon capture, grey hydrogen, etc., along with a lot of hot air. Incidentally, these four companies alone are responsible for 10% of all global warming in the world since 1965.”
It’s more likely that smart business owners know that so-called renewables aren’t fit for purpose.
Without subsidies and mandates there would be practically none.
The biggest subsidy is that the fossil fuel generation plants cover the costs of stability and intermediacy.
The generation costs for wind and solar may be less, but the costs of maintaining electricity 24/7/365 is not paid by wind or solar. They get the free ride.
Stealing a line from “Braveheart”: If battery storage is your (renewables) solution, why do they (batteries) keep burning to the ground? – see bottom Moss Landing, CA fire link. Another: If renewables are so cheap, why does renewables dependent New Jersey, for example, keep raising electricity rates; Australia? Same question for renewables caused blackouts…
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/fire-one-of-worlds-largest-battery-plants/3763727/
Is that the Braveheart that bears little relation to reality? A bit like the carbon dioxide hoax.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/mel-gibson-versus-history-braveheart-got-william-wallace-wrong/
Human beings are very easily misled.
But the James Horner music was/is good
The entire purpose of government subsidies is to make something less expensive to the public by using their tax dollars as a partial payment. The public is still paying full price, it’s just the government hiding some of the cost.
Actually the public is paying more because the government is borrowing the money and paying interest.
Not to mention a good chunk of the money is lost to graft and inefficiency.
Subsidies and grants are basically bribes to get you to do something you wouldn’t do with your own money.
When it comes from the government, it is your own money. They take it from you, and then make a big show about giving a small part of it back.
And taking their cut.
There are two basic types of energy: electrical energy and thermal energy. All the heavy industries, all the heavy transportation systems, all the emergency and military vehicles, and all the cars and light trucks will always use enormous amounts of fossil fuels.
Factoid: A Boeing 747-800 ER APC takes off with 346,000 lbs of jet fuel.
In most all of the countries, fossil fuels provide the thermal energy for space and water heating, and for cooking food. In winter fossil fuels provide heat energy that keeps humans and their pets from freezing to death.
Emergency power generation use diesel electric generators. All high-rise building have emergency generators for lighting hallways and stairs when primary power fails.
Major important uses of electricity are for refrigeration and lighting, for smelting bauxite, for electric motors used extensively in manufacturing and assembly plants and in elevators, for electric arc furnaces for recycling scrap iron and steel, etc.
These guys should take a winter vacation in Winnipeg. The average winter time temperature in January is -20°to -10° C. Winnipeg gets nat. gas from Alberta and electricity from hydro plants.
I’ll stop for now. Whatever are these green guys thinking? How is it that they ignore winter?
In the context of your post, you are correct.
There are other basic types of usable energy also, electromagnetic and nuclear/radiation, although radiation fits nicely in the thermal energy category as steam turbines driven by the heat of radioactive decay, is a means to generate electricity.
Sorry, wrong, wrong, wrong. Electrical and thermal are measures of energy, not energy itself.
electricity is just a carrier of an actual energy source and thermal is just the result of dissipating energy. The only real and portable energy is from fossil fuels. Nuclear, hydro (actually gravitational), wind (kinetic energy from a moving mass of air) and solar are sources but are neither portable nor dense.
So, chemical, potential, kinetic and electromagnetic radiation (photons). These are actual types of energy.
I have a theory that only photons are ‘real’ energy, all else being potentially photons, but that’s another story.
“I have a theory that only photons are ‘real’ energy”
Photons are not real. That is a mathematical definition, a quantum of energy needed to transition a valence electron to a higher energy state or emitted the the valence electron transitions to a lower energy state.
Photons have specific energy value depending on which electron/atom/molecule is involved. Photons have no rest mass and zero size.
As such, a photon is a miniscule amount of energy in an electro magnetic wave.
🙂
Don’t forget about longevity.
Wind will be totally replaced 3 times over the average potential lifespan of a Gas Facility and 4 times over the potential lifespan of a Nuclear facility.
Solar is even worse with 4 replacements vs Gas and 5 vs Nuclear PLUS required replacements after every Hail Storm or strong wind event (possible annually)
“….. Trump administration denying climate change ….. ”
My understanding is that they agree that the climate is changing as it has always done but they don’t believe that CO2 has much if anything to do with it.
…. and there is no impending apocalypse.
Notice they talk about electricity capacity, not electricity generated. As that is 100% for a fossil fuel powered utility it is less than 15% for renewable unreliables. So for renewables to ‘break even’ you need 6 times more capacity than for fossil fuels. This makes the report a sleight of hand, a confidence trick. Dishonesty abounds, but are we really surprised?
Ruinables are so cheap they need to cram them down our throats and punish fossil fuels to make us buy them. We prefer expensive energy.
‘Consequently, the shares of fossil fuels and renewables in global installed electricity capacity now stand at almost 1:1.’
How do they calculate the share of capacity?
I ask because I ordered a 30GW wind power system from Amazon, but when I took it out of the box and switched it on, I only got 4GW.
Should I count it as 4GW, or 30GW?
It’s closer to zero you only got that when conditions were right so you still need a 30GW fossil fuel generator on standby when the conditions aren’t right.
So you didn’t actually save anything except a few emissions on days the conditions were right.
Nothing changes. The more renewables added to the grid the more the cost of electricity goes up and the more the media and government claim it is cheaper, and people notice. They aren’t fooling anyone.
But they blame it on natural gas prices. Funny that. If it were as cheap and reliable as they have been brainwashed to believe, there would be little or no use for natural gas.
‘In 2024, renewables made up 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions and 74% of electricity generation growth’
They forgot to add “with little to no effect on reliable, dispatchable, frequency-stable power to homes and industry”
Apparently you only have to throw money at a problem to make it work
And with little to no effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I notice that the UN only refers to electricity generation. In 2024, the growth in fossil fuels provided three times as much new energy as wind and solar combined.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/06/26/bp-energy-review-2024/
Counterpunch.org? I am unsure whether
their editors are Trotskyites or Maoists, but they are admitted Communists. What is ominous is that the press release reads like US legacy media.
Very nice Eric. It is journalists like Purkayastha and Secretaries General like Guterres that give journalism and government such low grades. How can they say stuff like this with a straight face? But we need to take them at their word, renewables are so much cheaper and so much more productive than fossil fuel and nuclear that all tax preferences, subsidies, mandates, environmental forgiveness and all other advantages must be withdrawn immediately. I say they wouldn’t last a month, they’re a bunch of liars and cheats.
We keep hearing that renewables are increasing at such a rapid pace that they will overtake all fossil-fuel-generated energy sources. Except on closer examination we find that wind and solar, for example. may have increased relative to what they themselves provided before, but compared to what they are providing now is essentially the same low percentage of overall global energy; e.g., 10-12%, while fossil fuels still give us 82%. So who’s trying to fool whom here, or maybe it’s another example of the climate alarmists, like the UN, trying to put on a brave face as they continue fighting a losing battle.
Take into account that in addition to installing new WTG and SV, they are closing and destroying thermal generators.
I keep asking this question, but don’t get an answer— how is it that renewables have the lowest cost of electricity generation, yet there is a strong positive correlation between the share of electricity provided by renewables and the price of electricity in a state or country.
Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan) gave us the answer in 1939’s Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
The Wizard of Oz: Pay No Attention
The socialist answer is that the reason why everything costs more is greedy capitalists, and the answer is of course to give more power to government.
“While almost the entire world has increasingly switched to renewables, …”. (My emphasis.) Like India and the PRC, as well as many developing countries?
Story tip
These are recorded figure for the EU(27)+UK in 2024 a relatively poor year for Renewables.
EU(27)+UK productivity / capacity %
Onshore Wind 22.8%
Offshore Wind 29.7%
Wind combined 23.8%
Solar PV 11.0%
combined “Renewables” productivity 16.8%
These low values mean that Renewables are really expensive as means of power production, when compared with Conventional power generation (Fossil Fuels and Nuclear) operating at productivities in the region of 90%, accounting for maintenance. In other words the scale of Renewables installations have to be ~5+ times larger to unreliably supply the same level of power to the grid. Some numbers for Europe here.
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/analysis-of-renewable-power-de-uk-fr-in-the-context-of-europe-2024/
This from a UN that is loath to investigate slave labor camps in western China making a majority of the global solar supply chain. A carefully crafted statement avoiding the ire of the CCP is not the same as going there and setting up observers and taking testimony on those who escaped the initial roundup with relatives there. Silence should not be rewarding for the UN or VW who only recently closed their plant there.