Center for Competitive Sustainability

Our World in Data (and many others) tell us that wind and solar have fallen dramatically to well below the cost of coal- and gas-fired electricity. But their data look suspect for anyone who remembers the wholesale price of electricity in the mid-2000s. The claims for wind and solar have received a lot of well-justified scrutiny. They are nonsense. In this article, we look at another element - the cost of coal-fired electricity. It has apparently remained almost constant at around $110/MWh from 2009 to 2019. In reality, it was a fraction of that in 2009. The cost of coal has varied dramatically over the period, which will have produced much more variation in the cost of coal-fired generation than indicated by OWiD's misleading charts. When you look at how the costs and shares of various electricity technologies have varied over the period, it is impossible to square the claimed costs with the volumes and prices (wholesale and retail).

We can't falsify claims about the future until we get there. If those in power justify bad policy on the basis of questionable "pathways", we can't beat them by claiming to know better about the future. But we do know that the pathways are highly uncertain. And we know that dirigisme is a bad approach to policy where there is a great deal of uncertainty and complexity. We don't need a better crystal ball to counter the bad policy. We just need to show that the uncertainty is such that we should rely on emergent order and discovery, rather than human-imposed order and central planning. Net Zero is an extreme case of bad policy based on uncertain expectations; some of them so uncertain that they haven't even been invented yet. We should not be planning a path to a particular outcome (Net Zero 2050). We should be internalising the externality (i.e. polluter pays) so that the climate impact is factored into our choices, and seeing what emerges as a result.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy is widely used as a reference source for energy statistics. Sadly, it turns out that BP's bias as an oil company leads it to distort the data badly. Their categorisation seems to lead to ignoring biomass heat, the largest use of biomass. Consequently, they significantly underestimate biomass's share of primary energy supplies.