That quote above from the NY Times article, linking to the IEA, is a little misleading. From the Statistical Review of World Energy, below are the TWh produced by renewables, coal, and total electricity generation for 2022.
2022 World electricity generation Renewables 4,204 TWh Coal 10,317 All sources 29,165
Does anyone really think that renewables are going to more than double in two or three years? The trick is, they need to include hydroelectricity in the renewables category, in order to get close to the electricity produced from coal. If hydro is included, then about 29% of world electricity is currently produced from renewables, while 35% is from coal. As I have reported here in the past, the state of California does not allow large hydroelectric dams to be included in the definition of renewable energy. From my experience, many environmentalists hate hydroelectricity almost as much as they hate nuclear energy. They would prefer to see the dams torn down, so the salmon can swim freely, or something. But, if they need to include hydro in order to make their renewable energy numbers look better, then so be it.
Secondly, the article says “The cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is falling fast and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal”. That statement is misleading, because the unstated implication is that electricity from the sun and wind is just like, and just as good as, electricity from gas, oil or coal. As constantly needs to be repeated, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With the capacity factors for solar and wind well below 50%, if a power company is going to add new capacity, they will also need to build reliable, dispatchable generators. Those dispatchable sources are often fossil fuels, usually natural gas here in the US. Therefore, comparing the costs of highly subsidized wind and solar to dispatchable fossil generators is somewhat deceptive.
Here is what the Energy Information Administration says about comparing different kinds of power plants with vastly different operating characteristics…
Because load must be continuously balanced, generating units that can vary output to follow demand (dispatchable technologies) generally have more value to a system than less flexible units that use intermittent resources to operate (resource-constrained technologies). We list the LCOE values for dispatchable and resource-constrained technologies separately because they are built to provide different services to the grid, and direct comparisons of cost between dispatchable and resource-constrained technologies may not be meaningful in most contexts.
Also:
The duty cycle for intermittent resources is not operator controlled, but rather, depends on the weather, which does not necessarily correspond to operator-dispatched duty cycles. As a result, LCOE values for wind and solar technologies are not directly comparable with the LCOE values for other technologies that may have a similar average annual capacity factor, and we show them separately as resource-constrained technologies.
The EIA states, in the sentences above, that it is improper to compare the costs of the intermittent renewables to the more reliable and dispatchable energy sources, but the NY Times writers do it anyway.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
I had several more items to discuss, but this post is probably already long enough…
- Pete