MIT Sloan School of Management:
“We find that RPS mandates have virtually zero impact on prices, and utility-scale renewables are actually associated with lower retail rates,” said Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor and Associate Dean for Climate and Sustainability at MIT Sloan, and faculty director of the MIT Climate Policy Center. “Energy generated by large-scale solar plants, for example, comes with lower transmission, distribution, and maintenance costs for utilities, and these efficiencies can be passed on to the consumer.”
Renewable power like solar and onshore wind is the least expensive and quickest power generation source to deploy in the United States, even without government subsidies, Lazard said in a report on Monday.
The cost to build new gas-fired power plants, meanwhile, has hit a 10-year high amidst the country’s record electricity use and growing backlogs for turbines and other equipment needed to construct the plants, Lazard, a global financial services firm, said in its annual Levelized Cost of Energy+ analysis.
Lazard:
Key Findings from the 2025 LCOE+ Report
Renewables Remain Competitive: Unsubsidized Wind & Solar Lowest Cost Generation Sources for Last 10 YearsDespite facing macro challenges and headwinds, utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis (i.e., without tax subsidies).
I would like to propose a $1 fine every time someone feels the need to say that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.
$100.
Solar is so cheap, Spacex (whose CEO owns a battery company and a solar company) has just announced that they’re not just going to start building gas pipelines to their data centres, they’re also going to start drilling for gas. Maybe Chris Wright is, occasionally .. right.
Elon Musk’s technology foresight batting average has sucked for years, from the Hyperloop to android robots to self-driving cars without lidar to Mars colonies to data centers in space. He’s very good at getting money from investors, though. The biggest screwups in SpaceX have been directly linked to Musk ignoring expert engineers.
Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/elon-musk-human-ponzi-scheme