Real costs: Why solar and wind energy are not market winners yet

livemint.com:

Despite us constantly being told that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity, governments around the world needed to spend $1.8 trillion on green transitions last year. “Wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil" is how US President Joe Biden conveniently justifies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on green subsidies. Indeed, arguing that wind and solar is the cheapest is a meme employed by green lobbyists, activists and politicians globally.

Unfortunately, as that $1.8 trillion price-tag shows, the claim is deceptive. Wind and solar energy only produce power when the sun is shining or wind is blowing. All the rest of the time, backup systems are needed, which makes their electricity enormously expensive.

This is why global electricity remains almost two-thirds reliant on fossil fuels—and why we, on current trends, are an entire century away from eliminating fossil fuels from the generation of electricity. The intermittency of green energy takes the ‘cheapest electricity’ claim apart. Modern societies need power 24/7, so unreliable and intermittent solar and wind sources entail large and often hidden costs.

This is a smaller problem for wealthy countries that have already built fossil-fuelled power plants and can simply use more of them as backup. It will, however, make electricity more expensive, as intermittent renewables make everything else intermittent too. In countries that are poor and electricity-starved, there is little fossil-fuel energy infrastructure to begin with.