Imagine if a solar-powered car were released tomorrow, it was cheaper to run than a gasoline-powered car. It would be incredibly attractive until you realize that – due to limitations in battery storage – the car won’t run at night or when it’s cloudy. 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. The rest of the time, their electricity is prohibitively expensive and a backup system is needed. For this reason, two-thirds of our global electricity demand is met by fossil fuels. And that’s why we’re still 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. However, 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 coal-fired power stations 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 they focus on growing the economy and helping millions of people rise 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, second only to 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.
We must not forget that wind and solar technology must 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-carbon energy research and development instead. Only a significant push in research and development can lead to the necessary technological advances—in reducing waste, improving battery storage and efficiency, and other technologies such as modular nuclear—that will make low-carbon energy sources truly cheaper. fossil fuels.
Björn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His new book is False Alarm – How Climate Change Panic is Costing Us Trillions, Hurting the Poor and Failing to Fix the Planet. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.