There’s a trio of words often used to lobby against renewables and defend fossil fuels, all of which DOE Secretary Rick Perry recently invoked: abundant, affordable, reliable. The basic talking point is that fossil fuels are so plentiful that we don’t have to worry about running out, so cheap we can’t afford not to burn them, and, supposedly unlike renewables, they’re reliable enough to keep the lights on.
Obviously these three traits don’t address the fact that burning fossil fuels cause climate change, and burning all the oil and gas and coal we can will make the planet fundamentally inhospitable for humanity.
But there’s an ever-growing body of evidence that even on their best three traits, fossil fuels are losing to renewables.
First off: abundance. As we see every day, there’s nothing more abundant than the shining sun and blowing wind. But by invoking the abundance of fossil fuels, its industry boosters are pushing back on the idea of Peak Oil, which is prediction that at some point we’ll run out of fossil fuels and have no choice but to embrace renewables. The peak oil scare has definitely subsided in recent years, as fracking has dramatically increased the amount of oil and gas available for us to dig up and burn. But is the abundance of fossil fuels actually all that good?
There’s plenty of coal, for example, left to be dug out of the ground. But while burning fossil fuels changes the climate globally, it also produces a massive amount of toxic waste locally that doesn’t always get handled well.
Just last week, a federal jury ruled last week that Jacobs, a company cleaning up a coal ash spill in Tennessee, failed to “exercise reasonable care” in protecting its workers. Specifically, 30 of the workers who cleaned up after a 2008 spill are already dead, and 250 more are sick and/or dying. So yes, there is certainly an abundance of coal, but with it comes an abundance of toxic waste. And, unsurprisingly, Trump’s deregulatory agenda means more people are going to be put in harm’s way.
Now, what about affordability? Surely cleaning up this toxic waste is worth it because coal is so much cheaper than alternatives, right? Wrong!
A new report out from energy analysts Lazar shows that not only is it cheaper to build new wind facilities than it is to build new coal plants, but it’s actually getting so cheap that it’s more cost effective to build new wind power facilities than it is to keep running existing coal plants.
Without including federal subsidies, a megawatt hour of wind power costs between $29 and $56. With the federal tax credit, it’s between $14 and $47 per megawatt hour. Building a new coal plant, on the other hand, would cost between $60 and $143 per megawatt hour, while running an existing coal plant costs between $27 and $45 per megawatt hour.
And because wind power will only get cheaper as the technology improves, and then runs on the free fuel, its price will only drop. In the end, no matter how cheap the process of burning coal gets, you’ll still have to pay for the fuel itself--not to mention the costs of cleaning up the toxic ash, or all that carbon pollution changing the climate.
Lastly, there’s the reliability point. The industry claims renewables are too weak to provide enough electricity to keep the lights on. But numbers coming out of Scotland are proving that wrong too. In October, wind power generated the equivalent of 98% of Scotland’s electricity. On wind’s strongest-performing day last month (the 23rd), wind provided Scotland with 105,900.94 MWh. That’s enough juice for 8.72 million homes, and was well over twice as much electricity as Scotland actually needed that day.
Clearly, the only thing abundant about fossil fuels is the pollution, they’re only affordable if you ignore that pollution, and what’s most reliable about them is how supposed fans of the free-market will praise them long after alternatives out-compete them.