https://financialpost.com/opinion/solar-wind-power-expensive
By Bjorn Lomborg, Special to Financial Post
Excerpt:
Global evidence is clear: Adding more solar and wind to the energy supply pushes up the price of electricity. Ontario families and businesses already know this — from bitter experience. Beginning in 2005, Ontario began phasing out coal and dove headlong into subsidizing wind and solar generation.
A relatively small amount of wind energy costs Ontarians over a billion dollars a year. One peer-reviewed study finds that the economic costs of wind are at least three times their benefits. Only the owners of wind power make any money; the “losers are primarily the electricity consumers followed by the governments.”
Yet, with the backing of powerful green energy interests and credulous journalists, politicians keep gaslighting voters, claiming green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. Supposedly, the green transition even makes money.
But solar and wind are only cheap when the sun is shining and the wind blowing. At all other times, their cost is infinite: no matter how much you pay, you can’t get any. But modern societies need around-the-clock power. The intermittency of solar and wind means backup is required, often delivered by fossil fuels. Which means citizens end up paying for two power systems: both renewables and their backups. Moreover, much more transmission is needed to get wind and solar to users, while, being used less, backup fossil fuels have fewer hours to earn back their capital costs. Both effects increase costs even further.
The International Energy Agency’s latest data from nearly 70 countries reveal a clear correlation between use of solar and wind and higher average household and business energy prices. In countries using little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is about 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (in C$2024). For every 10 per cent increase in the share of solar and wind, electricity costs rise by nearly eight cents per kWh. These numbers are for 2022 but the results were essentially the same for 2019, before the impacts of COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war.
In Germany in 2022 electricity cost 43 cents per kWh — more than twice the price in Canada and more than three times that in China. Germany has installed so much solar and wind capacity that on sunny, windy days, it satisfies close to 70 per cent of Germany’s needs — a fact the press eagerly reports. But it hardly mentions dark and still days, when renewables deliver almost nothing. Twice in the past couple of months, when it was cloudy and nearly windless, solar and wind delivered less than four per cent of the daily power demand.
Batteries can help but they’re expensive, too, and Germany’s entire battery storage runs out in about 20 minutes. That leaves more than 23 hours of energy powered mostly by fossil fuels. In December, with cloudy skies and nearly no wind, Germany faced the highest power prices since the spike caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Wholesale prices reached a staggering $1.40 per kWh.
Canada’s plentiful hydro power provides 58 per cent of its electricity, which is why there has been less drive to develop wind and solar, which deliver just seven per cent. But the urge to virtue-signal is strong. The federal government’s 2023 vision for the electricity system declares that shifting away from fossil fuels is a “scientific and moral imperative” and “the greatest economic opportunity of our lifetime.”
Yet the biggest take-away from the global evidence is that among all the nations in the world — many with very big green ambitions — not one gets lots of its power from solar and wind and has low electricity costs. The lower-right corner of the chart is simply empty.
