Renewable Energy Costs
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D–RI) claims that “renewable energy is less expensive” than fossil fuels and that President Trump is attacking offshore wind to raise the costs of electricity and thereby transfer money from “ratepayers and customers” to his “big fossil fuel donors.”
IN FACT, the cost of generating electricity via offshore wind is at least 242% more expensive than natural gas. Here are the specifics of how politicians like Whitehouse impoverish people by pushing offshore wind and other renewables:
- 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 offshore wind is 242% more expensive than natural gas.
- Even though the federal government has aggressively subsidized wind and solar for decades while simultaneously penalizing fossil fuels through targeted taxes and regulations, wind and solar provided only 6.6% of all U.S. energy in 2024.
- On top of federal subsidies, some states have subsidized wind and solar so intensely that 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 elevated rate doesn’t even account for all of the government spending on solar that is borne by taxpayers instead of consumers.
- In Whitehouse’s state of Rhode Island, which is a “national leader” in green energy, the average retail price of electricity is 87% higher than the U.S. average.
- In Germany, which is a “global leader in sustainable energy production,” the average price of household electricity is 3.5 times that of the United States.
