By Heartland Institute, Climate Change Weekly

Although data doesn’t support the claim, climate scolds and renewable-energy profiteers often claim wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power now, and certainly cheaper than coal. This is false.

Energy Information Agency (EIA) data on trends in industrial, commercial, and residential power rates and reliability clearly show that states which have led the way in displacing baseload fossil fuel power plants and existing nuclear with wind and solar have seen the fastest-rising electric prices and the highest number of outages, compared to states that haven’t followed the siren song or green energy to disaster.

Heartland’s 2025 study titled “Affordable, Reliable, and Clean: An Objective Scorecard to Assess Competing Energy Sources” reinforces and expands on the EIA’s conclusion.

Now the team at Energy Bad Boys (EBB) has undertaken “a system-wide look at the cost of existing coal plants in America” and compared those costs to politically favored, heavily subsidized industrial wind and solar facilities brought online and under construction. Spoiler alert: the comparison doesn’t favor “cheap” wind and solar. The EBB writers describe the scope of their study and data sources:

For this analysis, we looked at 82 coal plants in the United States that had FERC Form 1 data available through S&P Global. The original investments in the overwhelming majority of these plants have been fully depreciated. However, some were built in the 2010s, and many have been retrofitted with environmental controls and have ongoing capital upgrades, so we looked at fuel expenses, other operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses, and capital expenses to rank the facilities. We also excluded plants with capacity factors below 15 percent, as these plants are often underutilized because they are one foot out the door retirement-wise, and are unrepresentative of the operating coal fleet.

What EBB discovered is that, “[o]n average, existing coal plants operate at $45.57 per megawatt-hour (Mwh).” The discrepancy between the lowest-cost coal plants, operating at $22 to $27 Megawatts per hour, and the most expensive plants was their utilization rate. The more a plant is utilized, the lower the cost of the power it produces.

Using FERC data once again, the team at EBB found the average cost of an existing coal facility was far below the average cost of an existing industrial wind facility ($59.78 Mwh) and less than half the cost of electricity produced by an existing industrial solar facility ($102.40).

New industrial wind facilities are even less cost-competitive with existing coal than existing facilities are. New solar facilities remain uncompetitive as well, although less so than existing facilities.

“EIA assumptions in the annual energy outlook, even without firming costs, [new] wind is estimated at $62.09 per MWh and competes only with the 25% most expensive coal plants on the grid. Solar, at $74.55 per MWh, is only more cost-competitive than 6 out of the 82 coal plants—or 7 percent—in the analysis above,” writes EBB. “Based on these numbers, the average cost of existing coal is 27 percent more affordable than a new wind facility, and nearly 40 percent more affordable than new solar.”

Note these cost comparisons fail to include the significant firming costs—the battery storage or natural gas backup—needed to ensure a reliable electricity supply with intermittent wind and solar power. Had firming power been included, the large cost gap between cheap coal and expensive wind and solar would have been even greater. Even the highest-cost 25 percent of coal plants produce cheaper electricity than new wind and solar. Nor do EBB’s cost comparisons include the transmission buildout that wind and solar require to deliver the energy they produce to the locations where it is in demand, often separated by hundreds of miles.

Coal may eventually fall into disuse, but if it does in the near term, it will be for political reasons, not because wind and solar are cheaper—regardless of what green energy advocates and the lapdog media claim.

Source: Energy Bad Boys

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