Renewable energy doesn’t need subsidies to compete with fossil fuels when it comes to building new power plants.
That’s a key takeaway in Lazard’s annual report on electricity generation costs. The investment bank’s report measures the levelized cost of energy for various forms of electricity generation. The report is closely watched, and often criticized, in the energy industry, where it helps guide investment decisions.
This year’s edition, which was released Monday, is notable because it comes as President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are trying to eliminate tax credits for wind and solar. The political debate is playing out at a time when energy forecasters are projecting a rapid increase in electricity demand due to data centers and artificial intelligence.
Lazard calculates an energy resource’s levelized cost, or LCOE, by dividing a project’s lifetime energy production by its cost. This year’s report concludes that renewables are the “most cost-competitive form of generation,” even without subsidies.
“As such, renewable energy will continue to play a key role in the buildout of new power generation in the U.S,” the bank wrote. “This is particularly true in the current high power demand environment, where renewables stand out as both the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy generation resource.”
When thousands of solar industry executives gathered for the largest clean energy summit in North America last month, many were relieved to no longer be the center of attention in Washington.
Two months after President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans finished gutting tax credits for renewable energy projects in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the solar industry was racing to cash in during the limited window to qualify for subsidies before they evaporate.
But despite some executives’ relief, Trump officials are making their next moves in a campaign to undercut the solar industry. They are leaning on trade measures in an attempt to further strangle the industry, while delaying permits for renewables projects. And on Wednesday, Trump officials canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy funding, including for solar projects to connect to the grid, on top of $27 billion in grantsthey are already trying to claw back.
“Let me be clear, the people in power right now are openly hostile to our industry. They are using every tool at their disposal to slow us down,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), told attendees of the RE+ trade show in Las Vegas during her keynote speech.
The administration’s latest weapon against the industry comes from the One Big Beautiful Bill, which imposes a set of complex rules aimed at blocking certain countries from supplying components, financing and intellectual property to U.S. renewables companies. Known as Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) restrictions, the measures are primarily directed at China, which controls more than 90 percent of the market for polysilicon and some other basic solar panel components.
Virtually every company in the solar sector could be affected in some way by the new rules, which begin going into effect next year, said Peter Rogers, a tax partner at the law firm Bracewell LLP. There have never been comparable restrictions for fossil fuels or other traditional forms of energy.
“They are extraordinarily complicated, very dense, and the reality is that at this point — given that we don’t have guidance yet — it is very very challenging to actually implement the rules,” Rogers said. “So there’s a lot of uncertainty.”
I can report that in my home state of Michigan I’ve been keeping track of solar development, which is, if anything, accelerating, if for no other reason that there is nothing else available in the near term, and utilities are desperate to serve burgeoning demand.
maga = Madness
sS they can’t win. They have no idea what they are doing.
The republic has been destroyed by idiots.
“Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Fox: “We’re announcing today expanded programs to help the American coal industry. We’re helping it because for years it has been under assault. It was out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, and NYC”
Sure. It wasn’t the development of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing, creating large new supplies of natural gas in a United States , that started the decline of coal. It was “the chardonnay set”. Not market forces, just parody liberals. Got it.
Heck even Rick Perry’s DOE was smarter and less criminally biased. They did a study in 2017 to find out why coal and nuclear plants were shutting down.
“Department of Energy Finally Admits That Economics, Not Renewables, Is Killing Coal”
“What Did This Study Find?
The study clearly showed that economics — not renewable energy sources like wind and solar — is responsible for killing coal. The proliferation of natural-gas fired power plants, another dirty fossil fuel, was the biggest driver for change. Fracked-gas is cheaper than coal, so old coal-burning plants can’t compete.”
https://www.clf.org/blog/doe-economics-killing-coal/