Why solar and wind energy aren’t winning

PHOTO BY REM ZAMORA

Despite us constantly being told that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity, governments around the world needed to spend $1.8 trillion on the green transition last year. “Wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil” is how United States President Joe Biden conveniently justifies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on green subsidies. Indeed, arguing that wind and solar are the cheapest is a meme employed by green lobbyists, activists, and politicians around the world. Unfortunately, as the $1.8 trillion price tag shows, the claim is wildly deceptive.

Wind and solar energy only produce power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. All the rest of the time, their electricity is infinitely expensive and a backup system is needed. This is why global electricity remains almost two-thirds reliant on fossil fuels—and why we, on current trends, are an entire century away from eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation.

The first reason the cheapest electricity claim is wrong is the intermittency of green energy. Imagine if a solar-driven car was launched tomorrow, running cheaper than a gas vehicle. It seems alluring, until you realize the car won’t run at night, or when it’s overcast. If you bought the car, you would still need a gas vehicle as backup. You would have to pay for two cars.

That’s what happens with renewable energy. Modern societies need power 24/7, so unreliable and intermittent solar and wind bring large, often hidden costs. This is a smaller problem for wealthy countries that have already built fossil power plants, and can simply use more of them as backup. It will, however, make electricity more expensive, as intermittent renewables make everything else intermittent, too.

But in the poorest, electricity-starved countries, there is little fossil fuel energy infrastructure to begin with. It is often reported that large, emerging industrial powers like China, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are getting more power from solar and wind. But these countries get much more additional power from coal. Last year, China got more additional power from coal than it did from solar and wind. India got three times as much, whereas Bangladesh got 13 times more coal electricity than it did from green energy sources, and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more. If solar and wind really were cheaper, why would these countries miss out? Because reliability matters.

The typical way to measure the cost of solar simply ignores its unreliability and tells us the price of solar energy when the sun is shining. The same is true for wind energy. That does indeed make their cost slightly lower than any other electricity source. The US Energy Information Administration puts solar at 3.6¢ per kilowatt-hour, just ahead of natural gas at 3.8¢. But if you reasonably include the cost of reliability, the real costs explode—one peer-reviewed study shows an increase of 11 to 42 times, making solar by far the most expensive source of electricity, followed by wind.

The enormous, additional cost comes from the need for storage. Electricity is required even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, yet our battery capacity is woefully inadequate. Just to pay for the batteries would cost the US five times its current GDP. And it would have to repurchase the batteries when they expire after just 15 years. Globally, the cost just to have sufficient batteries would run to 10 times the global GDP, with a new bill every 15 years.

The second reason the claim is false is that it leaves out the cost of recycling spent wind turbine blades and exhausted solar panels. Already now, one small town in Texas is overflowing with thousands of enormous blades that cannot be recycled. In poor countries across Africa, solar panels and their batteries are already being dumped, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil and water supplies. Because of lifetimes lasting just a few decades, and pressure from the climate lobby for an enormous ramp-up in use, this will only get much worse. One study shows that this trash cost alone doubles the true cost of solar.If solar and wind really were cheaper, they would replace fossil fuels without the need for a grand push from politicians and the industry. This claim is incessantly repeated because it is convenient. If we want to fix climate change, we instead must invest a lot more in low-CO2 energy research and development. Only a significant boost in research and development can bring about the technological breakthroughs that are needed—in reducing trash, in improving battery storage and efficiency, but also in other technologies like modular nuclear—that will make low-CO2 energy sources truly cheaper than fossil fuels. Until then, claims that fossil fuels are already outcompeted are just wishful thinking.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest books include “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”