Debate Desk
Are Wind and Solar Already Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels for Families?
A solar panel can make cheap power at noon; a grid that must run at night and in calm weather needs backup, and that cost does not appear in the headline price.
The claim
Advocates point to the falling cost of solar panels and wind turbines and say that new wind and solar plants are now the cheapest sources of electricity in much of the world. Continuing to build fossil plants, they say, simply raises costs for households.
The answer in three points
- The headline figure is the cost of generating a megawatt hour when the wind blows or the sun shines. It does not include the cost of the service people actually need, which is power on demand at every hour of every day. Providing that requires backup plants, storage and transmission.
- Wind and solar produce power only part of the time. Their output is measured against capacity as a capacity factor, and for these sources it is much lower than for nuclear or gas plants. A plant that runs a third of the time must be paired with something else for the rest.
- Subsidies and tax credits hide part of the true cost. Federal incentives for wind have been renewed repeatedly since 1992. If these sources were cheap without help, they would not need it, and the burden shifts to taxpayers or to ratepayers.
The cost of a system, not a single part, is what shows up on your bill.
The numbers
- The Energy Information Administration reports that in 2023 the average capacity factor was about 93 percent for nuclear plants, about 35 percent for wind and about 24 percent for utility-scale solar.
- The federal production tax credit for wind power was first enacted in 1992 and has been extended repeatedly since, according to the Department of Energy.
- The Energy Information Administration reports that natural gas and coal together supplied a majority of U.S. electricity generation in 2023.
What they will say next
"Batteries are solving the intermittency problem." Batteries help with daily shifts of a few hours, and their use is growing quickly. They do not yet cover multi-day lulls or seasonal swings at a scale that replaces firm power, and that gap is the expensive part.
"Gas prices swing wildly, while sun is free." The sun is free, and the equipment, land and lines are not. Gas prices do vary, and long-term contracts and domestic supply can reduce the swings.
"Texas leads in wind and has low prices." Texas also has abundant gas capacity that fills the gaps, and it suffered a blackout in 2021 that showed how the whole system must be judged on reliability.
"Utilities choose them on cost." Utilities respond to rules and incentives set by governments. When mandates and credits are in place, a utility's choice is not a pure market signal.
The sound approach is to let every source compete on a level field and to count all the costs.
"Wind and solar prices fell dramatically over a decade." They did, and that is a real achievement of innovation. The price of a part is not the price of a reliable system, which is what a family pays for.