IN THIS ISSUE:
- Existing Coal Plants Are Cheap Compared to Wind and Solar, Research Shows
- Cloud Changes May Reduce Temperature Rise, New Study Says
- Fossil Fuels Still Dominate Power, Despite Government Renewable Push
Existing Coal Plants Are Cheap Compared to Wind and Solar, Research Shows
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
Cloud Changes May Reduce Temperature Rise, New Study Says
Climate Change Weekly regularly highlights factors other than greenhouse gases that impact global temperatures and which climate models fail to account for. With some regularity, new research discloses forcing factors, local, regional, and global, that tend to raise or lower temperatures, that models fail to factor in and that scientists arguing human emissions are the sole or primary driver of global temperatures and climate change are either unaware of or choose to ignore because it calls into question some or all of the narrative they have developed, that humans are causing catastrophic climate change.
Another such temperature-modifying or -mitigating factor was just discovered: the change in high-cloud liquids caused by a decline in dust or aerosol particles that form water droplets.
Research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds high clouds in the mid-latitudes are changing the types of water content, shifting from ice to liquid, which is changing the how much light is scattered or absorbed, This change offsets as much as a quarter of the global warming impact of cloud cover.
The plain-language description of the study states,
Because liquid droplets reflect more sunlight into space than ice crystals do, this phase transition acts as a cooling mechanism. This study reveals that the ongoing decline of mineral dust in the Northern Hemisphere is significantly accelerating this cooling effect. Since dust particles serve as essential seeds for ice formation, their scarcity during the past decades causes clouds to transition into reflective liquid droplets more rapidly than in the past. This dust-driven phase-shift of high clouds (<440 hPa) in mid-high latitudes, shown in our study, creates a powerful radiative buffer that offsets approximately 25% of the heat trapped by other net warming feedbacks. These findings suggest that current climate models, by neglecting the coupling between aerosol-cloud phase changes, may be overestimating the projected rate of global temperature rise.
“Cleaner clouds are helping to slow the rate of global heating, a study shows,” The Guardian reported, to its credit one of the few media outlets covering the study. “Falling levels of dust in the atmosphere are making clouds more reflective.
“This previously unidentified effect is not being taken into account by current climate models, which may mean they are slightly overestimating the projected rate of global heating,” The Guardian reported.
In fact, this might account at least in part for why climate models routinely overstate the amount of warming the Earth has experienced when compared to real-world data from satellites, weather balloons, and even urban heat island biased ground-based temperature stations.
Sources: The Guardian; Geophysical Research Letters
Fossil Fuels Still Dominate Power, Despite Government Renewable Push
Using messaging to put lipstick on a pig, the annual Energy Institute (EI) statistical review and the assurance risk management company DNV Group’s report on the Global Energy Transition outlook both tout significant growth in wind and solar energy around the globe, but most rapidly in China.
The DNV group writes, for example, “By the end of 2025, global solar PV capacity will exceed 3,000 GW, with 47 percent installed in China and 20 percent in Europe as the two leading regions.” The EI report states there was a “+30% Global growth in solar energy in 2025 compared to the previous year.” Growth was strong, but it came from a much lower base as a percentage of the total energy mix.
The more important part of each report acknowledges energy demand overall is growing and fossil fuels, including coal, are also growing along with it. As a result, renewables have still displaced little fossil fuel energy as part of the overall energy mix, despite decades of rapid growth year over year.
“Fossil fuels continued to expand in absolute terms and retained their dominant position, accounting for 86 percent of [total energy supply],” the report stated.
The fossil fuel share was more than 80 percent a decade ago, and more than 80 percent a decade before that, so despite the rapid growth in the supply of renewables, the world remains wedded to fossil fuels.
The focus on affordability and reliability in electric power, displacing the misguided chase for net zero, has resulted in continued growth in natural gas and a resurgence in coal in the United States and other developed countries. Based on recent policy shifts, both reports indicate emissions reductions by 2050 will be far short of what’s needed to reach net zero.
“The transition we forecast remains too slow to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement—net zero emissions is not achieved until the latter part of the century, with dangerous warming of 2.2°C by 2100,” even with a 43 percent reduction in emissions from the present to 2050, reports DNV. I would wager even that is optimistic unless it is seen as a 43 percent reduction as a percentage of GDP.
“Global CO2 emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels rose by 1.1 percent to 35.8 gigatonnes of CO2 [in 2025],” according to EI. “Global oil consumption grew by 1.3% in 2025, an increase from the 1.1% growth seen in 2024. … Global coal consumption grew by 0.7 percent in 2025, … [and] [g]as demand saw the second-largest rise after renewables in 2025, growing by 1.6 percent year-on-year. …”
The problem with the claim that the world is undergoing an “energy transition” is that even a small percentage of growth in coal, oil, or gas amounts to much more energy produced and used than an increase in solar or wind that is multiple times larger as a percentage of current use, a fact pointed out by outlets such as The Fraser Institute, Energy Now, and Fox News.
Although headlines may proclaim renewables are the fastest-growing energy source, which is true, they are hardly making a dent in the commanding lead fossil fuels (which are also growing) hold in the overall percentage of energy demanded and used daily.
In accounting for the sources of the world’s primary energy consumption, coal may no longer be king (oil has deposed it), but renewables must still call it Daddy! In 1965, coal delivered 1.4 times more energy than wind and solar combined do today, and at present, it delivers four times more energy than they do combined. That’s a lot of catching up to do.
Sources: Energy Institute; DNV (Det Norske Veritas)
