Wind, Solar, Batteries: The High Cost of Duplicative Energy

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Wind, Solar, Batteries: The High Cost of Duplicative Energy
By Bill Peacock -- February 10, 2025

“The data make it clear that the only possible rationale for renewable energy—making significant reductions of CO2 emissions—cannot be achieved. The costs of attempting to do this are already imposing heavy costs on economies across the world.”

By the 1800s, wind and solar were both mature and successful technologies. Yet as soon as Western society developed the wealth and technology to take advantage of fossil fuels, they were discarded—along with batteries for electric cars—with no place in the modern world for grid-scale generation of electricity. 

Renewable energy still cannot compete with the efficiency, affordability, and reliability of fossil fuels. But this has not stopped it from making a comeback on the backs of American taxpayers and consumers who have paid for hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies from federal, state, and local governments. 

 Renewables need these subsidies because the cost of generating electricity from wind and solar plants—and the cost of storing it in batteries—greatly exceeds the cost of generating electricity from natural gas. In a real-world setting, wind generation costs three times that of natural gas, and solar generation and battery storage are four times greater.

https://www.masterresource.org/peacock-bill/wind-solar-batteries-high-cost-duplicative-energy/

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Lifted from report

False Energies

Many alternative energy sources to fossil fuels have been proposed along the way. 

These include algae, saltwater, landfill gas, cold fusion, biodiesel, ethanol, ocean waves, and hydrogen. All these have failed. Another proposed alternative, synthetic fuels, also failed despite being supported by President Jimmy Carter and Congress with close to $1 billion in funding.

Nuclear energy has shown commercial promise as an alternative but has largely been shut down by governments even though the process emits no CO2. Today the darling of the anti-fossil fuel crowd is wind and solar power, along with the batteries needed to store their intermittent and often unneeded generation of electricity for those times when the electricity is needed but wind and/or solar are not generating.

The hallmark of renewable energy sources in the ancient world—wind-, solar-, and hydro-power—was that they were dependent on the weather. They were all humankind had, along with animal power, for several millennia because the capital and technology needed to build the infrastructure to support fossil fuels were insufficient. It stayed that way until the 1800s, when wealth had expanded throughout the Western world to the point where coal, oil, and natural gas became economically viable.