President Joe Biden asserted in a recent speech that 'wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil.' This is blatantly incorrect. There are numerous defenses for Biden's assertion. But not only are they all susceptible to refutation, but they have all already been disproved.
Alex Epstein, in his book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, explains that two facts are ignored when pretending that wind and solar are cheaper. The first is that
These sources that are "significantly cheaper" are only cheaper because we indirectly pay for handouts that make them cheaper. On top of that, this fact doesn't do much more than talk about how other rules and incentives can change the prices of energy. The US Department of Energy has a list of 1,854 different rules and incentives that are in effect right now. There are so many different types of government interference in the market that when I first tried to download the dataset to look at the rules that are in place, my computer crashed. Energy is one of the most heavily controlled industries in the world. This is done to make it look like wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels.
solar and wind exist in large quantities exclusively in places where they are given massive government preferences. When you look at where solar and wind are used, you will invariably find subsidies—that is, the government forcing taxpayers to give money to solar and wind companies. Often, governments actually mandate a certain percentage of solar and wind by law.
Epstein solves the question of why so much money needs to be spent on supposed alternative energies if they are so much cheaper. This leads to the second often-ignored fact: "Contrary to claims of lower costs, places that use the most solar and wind on their grid tend to have the highest electricity costs."
This is because even if you agreed that wind and solar are cheaper than coal and oil (they aren't) and that this is happening on a free market (it's not), you'd still be missing part of the story. Even if wind and solar had lower costs in terms of money, they would make up for it in terms of how hard it is to use them and how often they work.
Epstein shows that solar and wind are not as clean as fossil fuels by showing that they need more land per unit of energy, more mining-intensive resources (ten times more mined materials are needed to build the infrastructure for fossil fuels to make electricity), and more expensive long-distance transmission infrastructure. He says that pollution is a big problem for how cheap wind and solar power are.
But that's not the end of the costs. They are made worse by the fact that they don't always work. One of the most important things about any kind of energy is being able to control it, but you can't do that with solar and wind power. Epstein shows that there are three ways to deal with these two different kinds of costs: Relying on some controllable source of energy, such as fossil fuels Relying on a diverse, distant, and enormous network of solar panels and wind turbines—so there is always sufficient electricity from somewhere Relying on a man-made storage system to store enough intermittent energy to always be able to meet demand As of now, neither solar nor wind have shown to be cost-effective, and only the first method, which uses a source of energy that can be controlled, like fossil fuels, has been used at all.
President Biden and others who don't like fossil fuels will always say things like, "Wind and solar are a lot cheaper than coal and oil," but this is just not true. Wind and solar power are not less expensive than oil and coal. They need a lot of help from the government just to be able to compete, and even with that help, they are still not dependable enough and need fossil fuels to keep going.
