Excellent article in the New York Times the other day on how solar and wind are quickly catching up to and becoming more competitive than conventional fossil fuels for power generation. For all of us in the industry we’ve definitely seen the writing on the wall and have and had the sort of back of the envelope feeling that renewables were rapidly catching up, but maybe didn’t have exact figures beyond our local markets and a couple of quick statistics we could ramble off. The New York Times article should hopefully be very helpful, or at least a start, in pushing the to the wider public.
We’re not going to summarize the full article, simply because it worth reading in and of itself, but here are some of the quick recent statistics, “According to a study by the investment banking firm Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as 1.4 cents. In comparison, natural gas comes at 6.1 cents a kilowatt-hour on the low end and coal at 6.6 cents. Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.”
The full article was originally written by Diane Cardwell and appeared int he NY Times on Nov 23 2014, read it here.