If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Do They Make Electricity So Expensive? | Power Line

If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Do They Make Electricity So Expensive? | Power Line
"We are constantly hearing about the declining cost of wind and solar energy. 
Yet electric rates keep rising, especially in areas that have invested heavily in these “green” technologies. How can that be?
Michael Shellenberger answers that question in a guest post at Watts Up With That?

Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Electricity prices increased by:

* 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;

* 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;

* over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?

Especially since, during the same time, the cost of natural gas plummeted while coal and nuclear were flat. 
So what’s happening?

...The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do...

This is exactly what has happened in Minnesota, as documented by Steve Hayward and Peter Nelson in their paper for Center of the American Experiment titled Energy Policy In Minnesota: The High Cost of Failure..."
Read on!