Imagine if a solar-powered car were released tomorrow, it was cheaper to run than a gas-powered car. It would be incredibly attractive until you realize that the car won’t work at night or in cloudy weather due to limitations in battery storage. If you buy the car, you’ll still need a gas car as a backup. You will have to pay for two cars.
This is exactly the situation we face with renewable energy. Wind and solar power only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows. At all other times, their electricity is infinitely expensive and a backup system is needed. This is why two-thirds of our global electricity needs are met by fossil fuels. This is why we are 100 years away from eliminating fossil fuels in electricity generation.
We are in a strange situation where politicians and the green energy industry constantly repeat that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Still, governments spend $1.8 trillion annually on the green transition, and the real cost of forcing people to use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels is even higher.
The modern world needs power around the clock. Unreliable and intermittent wind and solar come with huge, often hidden, costs. This is a relatively minor problem for rich countries that already have residual power plants they can use as backup – although it makes electricity more expensive because intermittent renewables make everything else intermittent.
However, the poorest countries that do not need electricity have little fossil fuel energy infrastructure. Hypocritical rich countries refuse to finance much-needed fossil fuel energy in the developing world. Instead, they insist that people cope with unreliable green energy supplies that cannot run pumps or farm machinery to lift the population out of poverty.
For the world’s large, developing industrial nations, such as China, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, dependence on coal is an inevitable reality. Last year, China generated more additional energy from coal than from wind and solar. India got 3 times more coal, Bangladesh got 13 times more coal from green energy sources, and Indonesia got a staggering 90 times more coal. They don’t drag their feet just to be difficult. Credibility is important—especially when you’re focused on growing your economy and helping millions of people lift themselves out of poverty.
Misconceptions about the price of wind and solar energy are possible because the price usually quoted is the price when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. On this basis, they are really relatively cheap. But once you factor in the cost of reliability, the price tag explodes—one peer-reviewed study shows an increase of between 11 and 42 times, making solar the most expensive source of electricity, followed by wind.
Unfortunately, storage technology remains inadequate. Scientists recently looked at the United States and found that to get reliable, 100 percent solar or wind electricity, we need about three months of annual electricity storage capacity. It only has seven minutes of battery life in the US. Closing the storage gap would cost five times the entire US GDP, and the storage would have to be replaced every 15 years.
And we have to remember that wind and solar technology itself needs to change at a fairly alarming rate. Already, a small town in Texas is overflowing with thousands of giant wind turbine blades that cannot be recycled. In poor African countries, solar panels and their batteries are thrown away. One study shows that this doubles the true cost of solar energy when we factor in the costs of recycling and safe disposal.
If wind and solar power were truly cheaper than fossil fuels, billions of dollars in taxpayer spending would not be needed. This claim is constantly repeated because it is convenient and because it supports the political narrative.
But the truth is, if we want to fix climate change, we need to invest more in low-CO₂ energy research and development instead. Only a significant boost in research and development can deliver the necessary technological breakthroughs – reducing waste, improving battery storage and efficiency, as well as other technologies such as modular nuclear – that will make low-CO₂ energy sources truly cheaper than fossil fuels.
