Renewables: Still not cheap

in cost cited by those in the real and imagined worlds is called wishful thinking. This wishfulness is propped up through academic exercises that provide a stamp of authority on the ideologues’ beliefs.

One method for proving that renewables have arrived is something called “levelized cost of electricity,” which the U.S. Energy Information Administration says is “often cited as a convenient summary measure of the overall competitiveness of different generating technologies.” Environmentalists cite levelized costs as if you can take them to the bank, but they are really no more than predictions of what the costs of various technologies will be over subsequent decades. By assuming that costs of producing solar panels and wind turbines will drop and the costs of fossil fuels will rise over the 30-, 40- or 50-year lifetime of a new plant a utility must build, and describing those levelized costs as if they were current costs, studies state authoritatively that renewables have become cheaper than fossil fuels.

Today’s claims that renewables are cheap and getting cheaper are familiar. They harken back to the first Earth Day in 1970, whose message of “New Energy for a New Era” was all about accelerating the transition to renewable energy worldwide.

Then, as now, the belief in the viability of a renewable energy future was twinned with the conviction that fossil fuels, being finite, would inevitably become scarce and price themselves out of the market. To the ideologues’ never-ending dismay, peak oil never comes. Instead comes shale gas, shale oil, and peak renewables.