The Ongoing Fiction Of Cheap Wind and Solar Energy

Those claiming that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels should be writing scripts for science fiction dramas.

Yet global organizations such as investment firm Lazard and the International Renewable Energy Agency expect this bogus claim to be taken seriously as a basis for investing many billions into essentially useless technologies to save the planet from a made-up climate crisis.

The metric used to perpetuate the wind and solar fantasy is the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), a deeply flawed tool that masks the real costs of these energy sources whose ability to perform is subject to the weather and time of day. 

Designed to deceive, LCOE creates a mirage that has seduced many a foolhardy policymaker. LCOE takes the total lifetime cost of building and operating a power plant and divides it by the amount of electricity it will generate. This gives a cost per megawatt-hour that can be compared across technologies. But there’s a catch – actually, several.