You’re standing in a crowd, waiting for the start of a the London Marathon. You have a C-note in your pocket, and you want to bet on who’ll win the race. You scan the runners. Suddenly, you spot a familiar face. It’s Usain Bolt, the fastest man alive!
You don’t know it yet, but you’ve just made what’s likely the worst bet of your life, having fallen for one of the oldest mistakes in the book—confusing speed with endurance.
Bolt has a smile on his face and a swagger in his step. He looks like he owns the place. You think to yourself, this is it. This is the sure thing you’ve been waiting for. The answer to your prayers. You rush to the nearest bookie and put your money on Bolt to win it all.
You see, Bolt is a sprinter… not a marathoner. And running 26.2 miles is a wholly different challenge than running 100 meters. Your expert self has duped you into making a bad decision by placing the “fastest man alive” label in your brain, even as you ignore the course to be run.
This is the same blunder many make when they buy into the notion that solar and wind energy are the “cheapest” forms of electricity in existence. They are led to believe that, since renewables are “cheap” in the short run, they must also be cheap over the long run—and thus, the best solution for our energy needs.
This then leads to embracing the narrative that switching to solar and wind power as soon as possible, and at any cost to the grid and the economy, makes sense. Save the planet and our wallets at the same time, the argument goes.
Unfortunately, it’s all wrong.
In reality, wind and solar energy have big limitations and drawbacks that make them unsuitable for what so many experts are trying to do with them. Our energy system is a massive always-on, always needed economic asset. Optimizing it requires more than just piling on solar panels and wind turbines, and then crossing our fingers that the stars align… day in, day out.
Getting to the right answer requires work. And developing a deeper understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of electricity production and consumption is essential to better solutions to climate change. So, in separate posts, we’ll soon be sharing the results of our deep dives into the real-world economics and implications of solar and energy. In the process, we’ll expose what we see as the omitted truths behind claims that renewables are the “cheapest” forms of electricity going.
In particular, we’ll show how “expert” claims in so many cases are based on flawed comparisons and hidden assumptions that ignore many important factors that govern the real costs of power generation in a market economy. In particular, we’ll show how renewables are like Usain Bolt—a dazzling performer that can impress in short bursts, but not in the long run.
Most importantly, we’ll show that renewables are not only not the answer to our energy challenges, but are increasingly the problem itself.