Alex Epstein, in his
book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, explains that two facts are ignored when pretending that wind and solar are cheaper. The first is that solar and wind exist in large quantities
exclusively in places where they are given massive government preferences. When you look at where solar and wind are used, you will invariably find subsidies—that is, the government forcing taxpayers to give money to solar and wind companies. Often, governments actually mandate a certain percentage of solar and wind by law.
These “significantly cheaper” sources only manage to be so when we’re paying indirectly for subsidies to make them cheaper. On top of that, this fact merely discusses the ways in which the prices of energy are otherwise distorted through various laws and incentives. The
United States Department of Energy lists 1,854 different laws and incentives currently on the books. There are so many various government interruptions in the market that when I first attempted to download the dataset to look at the laws currently in place, it crashed my computer. Energy is one of the most highly regulated markets in existence, all to create the appearance that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels.
From here, Epstein answers the question:
Why do supposed alternative energies need so much subsidization if they are so much cheaper? This leads to the second fact that is often ignored in this discourse: “Contrary to claims of lower costs, the places that use the most solar and wind on their grid tend to have the highest electricity costs.”
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