What That Flashy Renewable Energy Paper Got Wrong
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/amanda-levin/what-flashy-renewable-energy-study-got-wrong
What That Flashy Renewable Energy Paper Got Wrong
April 25, 2019 Amanda Levin
The costs of wind and solar energy keep falling; installing a new wind turbine costs about a third of what it did in 2008. Solar prices fell by 88 percent during that time. In fact, renewable energy is so inexpensive, utilities have
found that they can
save customers money by
closing coal plants
early and replacing them with wind and solar power.
Its against this backdrop that we must consider the
much-hyped new paper from the University of Chicagos Energy Policy Institute analyzing the impact of state renewable energy standards. The economists looked at these state efforts to boost solar and wind deployment (dating back to 1990) and conclude that these so-called RPS programs are costly and ineffective at addressing climate change.
But there are many reasons to be skeptical of these conclusions.
And this isnt the first paper to look at the impact of renewable energy standards, but it is one of the few to find such high costs. The Energy Departments national labs have done their own large-scale studies each year and found that these polices drive significant renewable energy development at low costs for customersabout 2 percent of an U.S. households average monthly bill (or a little more than $2 a month). And the benefits are enormous: They could top $1 trillionyes, trillion with a Tby 2030.