The true cost of wind and solar power | Guest comment

Imagine that tomorrow a solar-powered car, cheaper to run than a gas-powered vehicle, will enter the market. This would be extremely appealing until you realize that – due to the limited battery capacity – the car will not run at night or when it is cloudy. If you bought a car, you will still need a gas-powered vehicle as a backup. You will have to pay for two cars.

This is exactly the situation we face in the case of renewable energy. Wind and solar power only produce energy when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The rest of the time, their electricity is infinitely expensive and a backup system is needed.

For this reason, two-thirds of our global electricity demand is met by fossil fuels. And this is the reason we remain 100 years away from eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation.

We are in a bizarre situation where politicians and the green energy industry constantly repeat the refrain that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. But governments spend $1.8 trillion every year 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 unstable wind and solar energy carry large, often hidden costs. This is a relatively minor problem for rich countries that already have fossil fuel plants they can use as backup – although it does make electricity more expensive because intermittent renewables make everything else intermittent as well.

However, in the poorest countries without electricity, there is little energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels. Hypocritical rich countries refuse to finance much needed fossil fuel energy in developing countries. Instead, they insist that people cope with an unreliable supply of green energy that cannot power the pumps or agricultural machinery that would lift the population out of poverty.

For large emerging industrial countries such as China, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, coal dependence is an unavoidable fact. Last year, China got more additional energy from coal than from wind and solar. India got three times more, Bangladesh got 13 times more coal electricity than from green energy sources, and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more. They don’t delay just to make things difficult. Reliability matters – especially when you’re focused on growing the economy and helping millions of people escape poverty.

It is possible to be wrong about the cost of wind and solar energy because the price quoted is usually the price when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Based on this, it can be concluded that they are indeed relatively cheap. But when the cost of reliability is factored in, the price explodes – one peer-reviewed study shows an increase of 11 to 42 times, making solar power by far the most expensive source of electricity, closely followed by wind.

Storage technology is still woefully inadequate. Scientists recently looked at the United States and found that to achieve reliable, 100% clean solar or wind power, we would need the ability to store enough electricity for almost three months a year. The US only has seven minutes of battery storage. Closing the storage gap would cost five times the entire US GDP, and warehouses would need to be replaced every 15 years.

We must also remember that wind and solar technology itself needs to be replaced at quite an alarming rate. Already, one small town in Texas is overflowing with thousands of huge wind turbine blades that cannot be recycled. In poor African countries, solar panels and batteries are thrown away. One study shows that when we factor in the costs of recycling and safe disposal, this alone doubles the true cost of solar power.

If wind and solar power were actually cheaper than fossil fuels, there would be no need for billions of dollars in taxpayer spending. This claim is repeated over and over again because it is convenient and supports a political narrative.

But the truth is that if we want to fix climate change, we need to invest much more in low-CO₂ energy research and development instead. Only a significant push in research and development can deliver the necessary technological breakthroughs – in reducing waste, improving battery storage and efficiency, but also other technologies such as modular nuclear power – that will make low CO₂ energy sources truly cheaper than fossil fuels.