Wind & Solar Costs
CNN claims that “solar, wind and batteries are far cheaper than fossil fuels,” while President Trump claims that “windmills, and the rest of this JUNK” are “10 times more costly than any other energy.”
IN FACT, solar, wind, and batteries are significantly more costly than fossil fuels but not nearly 10 times as much. Here are the specifics:
- Determining the relative costs of electricity-generating technologies is very complicated because (1) utilities must produce enough electricity to meet their customers’ demands on a second-by-second basis, (2) the costs of generating electricity vary depending upon the exact moment when it is produced, (3) such projects are capital-intensive and have lifespans measured in decades, and (4) decisions to invest in new generating capacity frequently involve factors that are unique to each locale and each year.
- After stacking the deck with assumptions that make wind and solar appear less costly than reality, the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that natural gas is slightly more economically competitive than wind and solar. This doesn’t account for the cost of batteries, which are essential for producing wind and solar at scale because they produce nothing when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.
- Wind and solar provided only 6.6% of all U.S. energy in 2024, even though the federal government has aggressively subsidized them for decades while simultaneously penalizing fossil fuels through targeted taxes and regulations.
- Illustrating the additional impacts of state subsidies, the New York Times reported in 2024 that “thousands” of “renewable energy” companies “are reeling” from a reduction in only one California solar subsidy that transferred grid costs from solar to non-solar homeowners, causing a “sharp decline” in rooftop solar installations.
- Despite claims from politicians like Gavin Newsom that wind and solar are “the cheapest form of energy,” states and nations that disproportionally use them have much higher electricity prices than elsewhere. California, for example, gets more of its electricity from solar than any other state and also has the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S., or more than twice the national average. This doesn’t account for all of the government spending on solar that is borne by taxpayers instead of consumers.
- In Germany during 2021, wind and solar provided 32% of the country’s electricity, and the average price of household electricity was 3.2 times that of the United States.
