According to the website OilPrice.com: " on a global level, it’s increasingly apparent that renewables are simply too cheap to fail.

Over the past three decades, advances in technology and a maturing development ecosystem have made renewable energy projects more economical, less risky, and increasingly rewarding for landowners.

Not only have renewables outgrown subsidies and become independently successful, they’ve become so cheap that they are the most logical choice for new energy installations even in the poorest country contexts".

What a marvellous thing human ingenuity is. Natural oil and gas are resources that are far too important to waste on energy generation.

That's great WTF. So you are now in favour of technology neutrality and abolishing all subsidies to wind and sun?

I'm not sure if you realised this, but if we didn't have the subsidies, most of the arguments here would disappear.

That doesn't really follow, Graham.

Most of the cost declines we're talking about have already happened. New wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of new generation in most markets even without subsidies. That's why they keep winning auctions where subsidies are minimal or absent.

Also, "technology neutrality" only works if you apply it consistently. Fossil fuels still benefit from legacy subsidies, tax concessions, infrastructure support, and the unpriced costs of pollution and climate risk. Removing all subsidies and distortions wouldn't make renewables disappear. In many places it would make the gap clearer.

Subsidies helped renewables scale. The reason the argument hasn't disappeared is that the economics moved on.

Graham - I don't have a problem with subsidies from government to help get new technologies up and running or to support paradigm shifts in technological advances where there is a clear advantage to the general population.

However, as The Australia Institute analysis points out: In 2024–25, Australian governments provided $14.9 billion worth of spending and tax breaks to assist fossil fuel producers and major users, a 3% increase on 2023–24.

Subsidies in the forward estimates have increased from $65 billion to a record $67 billion, a sum 14.2 times larger than the nation’s $4.75 billion disaster response fund".

Only the extremely gullible and naive still fall for the "no subsidies for fossil fuels" myth. But you knew that before you responded (which is all a bit strange).

But that's not really the point.

What I find interesting is that this is the opinion of a platform designed mainly for investors, traders, fund managers, energy professionals, and policymakers.

This isn't about your next door neighbour putting in a battery for their solar panels but for those who have enormous amounts of capital to invest.

And yet we continue to see that the nations with the most renewables also have the highest electricity prices.

Cheapest form of power? Made up numbers to support a made up boondoggle.

Just as an aside, the vast majority of the Australia Institutes fake number is for taxes which they think should be charged but aren't charged. Again, made up numbers.

Power prices continue to rise even as we are told we are using the cheapest power....
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." Orwell 1984

Speaking of people knowing things before they respond…

mhaze,

We've been through this before, so let's not pretend this isn't anything more than repetition.

You're again conflating retail electricity prices with the cost of new generation, despite knowing they're not the same thing. Network costs, gas price shocks, legacy assets, and market design explain why retail prices move independently of whether new wind and solar are cheap to build. None of that is new to you.

Calling auction prices, LCOE data, and investor behaviour "made up numbers" isn't an argument. It's just refusing to engage with the methodology you don't like, while offering no alternative analysis of your own.

And the Australia Institute point is the same dodge you always run: pretending that unpriced pollution, tax concessions, and foregone royalties somehow don't count because they aren't written as a cheque. That's not exposing fake numbers. It's rejecting the concept of implicit subsidy altogether.

Quoting Orwell doesn't change any of this. It just signals that you'd rather frame disagreement as mass delusion than deal with distinctions you already understand.

If renewables weren't cheap to build, capital markets wouldn't be behaving the way they are. Crying "boondoggle" doesn't alter that reality.

But thank you for demonstrating the difference between scepticism and denialism. Essentially, your post amounts to:

I don't accept the framework everyone else is using, and I'm going to treat that rejection itself as proof that it's propaganda.

So same question. If its so cheap; if its so loved by investors...why does it need such massive subsidies. And if you think its those things why aren't you in favour of doing away with the subsidies?

The fact that I've mentioned the fact that there's a correlation between power costs and levels of renewable penetration before, doesn't make it any less true or any less devastating for the claims about renewables.

Re the Australian Institute number, fully 70% of it is for the Fuel Tax Credits Scheme ie return money that was incorrectly collected. Not a subsidy. But their number would look pretty sorry without the fudge, so they fudge.

"Calling auction prices, LCOE data, and investor behaviour "made up numbers" isn't an argument."

Well I didn't mention those things, but go ahead and make up stories - its what you're best at. The claims that renewables are cheap is based on selective exclusion of actual costs. That's why. in the end, these alleged cheap forms of power end up being very expensive.

BTW electricity prices rose 19.7% in the 12 months to November 2025. Tell me again how cheap renewables are.

mhaze,

You're still asking the same question because you're still refusing to accept the same answer.

Renewables don't "need" massive subsidies to be cheap. They received support to scale, just as every major energy technology has. The claim being made is about current marginal cost of new generation, not about whether governments should immediately zero out every policy lever. You know that distinction, yet you keep pretending it hasn't been made.

As for your insistence that correlation between retail prices and renewable penetration is "devastating": it isn't, and we've covered why repeatedly. Retail prices reflect networks, gas price shocks, legacy assets, market design, and regulatory decisions. They do not back-solve the cost of building a new power plant. Repeating a category error doesn't strengthen it.

Regarding the Australia Institute numbers, you're doing exactly what you always do: arguing that foregone taxes and fuel credits "don't count" because you've decided only direct cheques qualify as subsidies. That's not exposing a fudge. It's rejecting the concept of implicit subsidy altogether. You're free to do that, but you don't get to pretend it's an accounting correction rather than a definitional dodge.

The "you didn't mention auctions or LCOE" objection is just evasive. Those are precisely the datasets used to substantiate the claim you called "made up". If you reject them, the onus is on you to explain why investors, utilities, and governments keep relying on them instead of your preferred intuition.

And citing a 12-month retail price increase again just proves the same point you keep trying to dodge: system prices rising does not falsify the claim that new wind and solar are cheap to build. If it did, gas and coal would be cheap right now too.

At this point you're not critiquing renewables. You're critiquing the analytical framework used by energy markets, planners, and investors, and treating your rejection of that framework as proof it's propaganda.

That's denialism, not scepticism. And repeating it louder doesn't change what the numbers investors are actually acting on say.

JD what you’re doing here is collapsing a contested empirical question into a rhetorical one by declaring the analytical framework settled and dissent therefore illegitimate. That’s not analysis; it’s gatekeeping.

The claim that renewables are “cheap to build” rests almost entirely on selective use of LCOE and auction data, both of which abstract away from system costs that are not incidental but intrinsic. Dispatchability, firming, storage, network augmentation, inertia, and redundancy are not optional add-ons; they are the price of turning intermittent generation into a reliable electricity system. Excluding them may be analytically convenient, but it is not neutral.

You insist retail prices are irrelevant because they “don’t back-solve” plant costs. True, but irrelevant to what? Consumers do not buy marginal generation assets; they buy electricity delivered with reliability. If renewable penetration rises while delivered prices rise faster, the burden of proof shifts to those claiming cost reduction to explain why system-wide outcomes diverge from project-level metrics.

On subsidies, this is not a definitional dodge but a material dispute. If tax concessions, fuel credits, underwriting, capacity payments, priority dispatch, and mandated offtake materially alter investment decisions, then excluding them because they are “implicit” is an accounting choice with consequences. Investors respond to after-policy returns, not philosophical distinctions between cheques and foregone revenue.

Appealing to investor behaviour as proof is circular. Investors act rationally within the rules given; that says nothing about whether the rules produce least-cost outcomes for consumers or whether risks are being socialised while returns are privatised.

Finally, labelling disagreement as “denialism” is an attempt to moralise a technical dispute. Skepticism about model boundaries, cost attribution, and system effects is not rejection of evidence; it is a demand that the evidence reflect the full problem being solved.

If renewables are genuinely cheapest at the system level, that case should be demonstrable without narrowing the frame until contrary evidence is ruled out by definition.

Graham,

I'm not gatekeeping, and I'm not declaring dissent illegitimate. I'm simply insisting that we keep analytic distinctions intact rather than collapsing them after the fact.

LCOE and auction prices are not incomplete answers to a larger question. They answer a different question: what does it cost to add new generation capacity at the margin. On that question, wind and solar are now cheap. That claim does not pretend to describe the entire electricity system, nor does it need to.

Dispatchability, firming, storage, network augmentation, inertia, and redundancy all have costs. That is true for every generation mix, not a special disqualification of renewables. Coal, gas, and nuclear systems have historically socialised many of their system costs through networks, fuel security arrangements, and policy design rather than pricing them plant-by-plant.

Retail prices are a composite outcome of fuel markets, network regulation, legacy assets, and market design. They are not a clean test of marginal build costs. If rising retail prices were sufficient to falsify claims about generation costs, no energy transition in history could ever have been recognised while it was underway.

Regarding subsidies, investors responding to after-policy returns cuts both ways. If supports and unpriced externalities have long shaped incumbent technologies, insisting that only renewable supports invalidate cost claims is not neutrality but asymmetric accounting.

Finally, appealing to investor behaviour is not circular. It is evidence that large pools of capital, operating across different regulatory regimes, converge on similar conclusions about marginal build costs. That does not settle every system-level question, but it does settle this one.

The disagreement here isn't whether system costs exist. It's whether acknowledging them requires us to deny that renewables are now cheap to build, or to redefine "cheap" until only retail prices qualify as admissible evidence.

You’re not preserving analytic distinctions; you’re insulating one of them from relevance.

Yes, LCOE and auction prices answer a specific question about marginal build cost. The problem is not that this question is illegitimate, but that it is repeatedly treated as decisive in debates about affordability, transition speed, and consumer impact. Once that move is made, objections about system costs are no longer “a different question”; they are a challenge to whether the marginal metric is sufficient for the claims being drawn from it.

System costs are not symmetric across generation mixes. Dispatchability, firming, storage, and network augmentation scale non-linearly with penetration of intermittent generation. That is not a historical quirk or a legacy artefact; it is a physical constraint. Saying that all systems have system costs does not establish equivalence when the structure and growth rate of those costs differ materially.

Retail prices are not being invoked to back-solve plant costs. They are being invoked as a reality check on whether narrowing the frame to marginal build cost tracks outcomes people actually experience. If the cheapest-to-build technologies require increasingly expensive system scaffolding to function at scale, then insisting on treating those costs as analytically downstream becomes a substantive choice, not a neutral one.

On subsidies, the issue is not that renewables are uniquely supported. It is that contemporary cost claims are made while bracketing off policy settings that are doing active work now, not historically. That distinction matters if we’re using those claims to justify further policy decisions.

Finally, investor convergence does not “settle” the question. Capital chases risk-adjusted returns within given rules. That tells us what is privately rational under current frameworks, not what is system-optimal or least-cost once risk, reliability, and integration are fully priced.

The disagreement isn’t about redefining “cheap”. It’s about whether defining it narrowly enough to exclude the dominant costs of scale still deserves to anchor the debate.

Graham,

At this point, we're no longer disagreeing about costs. We're disagreeing about whether any bounded metric is allowed to inform debate at all unless it captures every system interaction at scale.

That standard would make meaningful comparison impossible in any complex infrastructure transition, and it is not how energy systems have ever been analysed in practice.

If the claim were that marginal build costs alone determine retail prices or system outcomes, I'd agree it fails. But that is not the claim being made.

Insisting that no partial metric may "anchor" discussion unless it subsumes the entire system doesn't make the analysis more rigorous. It just makes conclusions unreachable.

Only a lunatic would describe renewables as "cheap". Repeating lies often enough might fool some people some of the time, but this one won't fool people who see the lie everytime they get a power bill.

Adding to the massive costs of renewables is the risk of grass fires caused by solar panels - already occurring in NSW, with no way of stopping them occurring all over Australia, time and time again in our long hot summers.

No one's arguing that renewables make power bills cheaper, ttbn.

Isolated incidents don't establish inevitability, either. Fire risk is a design and land-management issue, not a property of "renewables" as such. If it were uncontrollable, insurers, regulators, and grid operators wouldn't be permitting large-scale solar at all.

Every energy system carries ignition risk. The relevant question is whether it's understood and mitigable, not whether anecdotes exist.

"Renewables don't "need" massive subsidies to be cheap."

Good. So you're in favour of removing them?

As to the correlation between retail prices and renewable, let me explain again...yet again.

The people who want to think that renewables are cheap, run their numbers by excluding a whole range of costs intricately attached to renewables not the least of which is the cost of building grid to the places the wind blows and the sun shines. The only way to ensure all the costs involved are taking into account is to look at the final price which incorporates all those costs. And when that's done on an international scale, it turns out (surprise, surprise) that those nations with high renewable penetration also have higher costs. Not just in one or two countries, but consistently across the globe.

I don't argue "foregone taxes and fuel credits "don't count". I'm saying that that the things the Australian Institute include aren't foregone taxes. They are tax refunds for monies incorrectly collected in the same way that a refund on PAYE at year's end isn't a tax cut. The diesel fuel tax is meant to recover the cost of diesel vehicles using public roads but its levied on all diesel fuel. So those who buy the fuel with the tax included but use it in vehicles that never see a public road, are due a refund. Calling it a subsidy is just dishonest and shows that they want to fudge the numbers to make a political point.

That doesn't follow, mhaze.

//So you're in favour of removing [renewables]?//

"Cheap to build" is a claim about marginal costs, not a claim about living in a policy-free universe. You're treating "remove all support immediately" as a litmus test in order to avoid engaging with the cost claim itself.

//The only way to ensure all the costs involved are taken into account is to look at the final price…//

No. Retail prices are a composite outcome of network regulation, fuel price shocks, legacy assets, and policy timing. They do not back-solve the cost of new generation. Treating them as the only admissible metric just vetoes any partial analysis by definition.

//Those nations with high renewable penetration also have higher costs… consistently across the globe.//

Correlation isn't explanation. You haven't shown that renewables are the driver rather than gas exposure, network regulation, legacy market design, or fuel shocks. Repeating the correlation doesn't turn it into causation.

//The cost of building grid to the places the wind blows and the sun shines.//

All generation mixes require transmission, redundancy, and grid build-out. Coal and gas systems historically socialised those costs rather than pricing them plant-by-plant. Pointing at grids doesn't establish asymmetry unless you show the costs are uniquely attributable to renewables at scale.

//They are tax refunds for monies incorrectly collected… calling it a subsidy is dishonest.//

Call it a refund if you like. The economic fact remains that diesel used in fossil fuel production is effectively untaxed relative to other energy inputs. That's differential treatment, not neutral accounting.

At this point the disagreement isn't about data. It's about whether any bounded metric is allowed to inform discussion unless retail prices fall immediately.

That standard makes meaningful analysis of energy transitions impossible, and it's not one you apply consistently elsewhere.

What about the cost of labour in all these cost estimates?
Do countries with lower labour costs have different levels of viability for different energy projects?

What if we had the Chinese come in and build our stuff for us with Chinese labour, we might lose the potential Aussie jobs, but the projects might only cost half the price?
2 for the price of 1.

We like to save money by buying cheap Chinese manufactured good from China. There's no Aussie jobs in the manufacturing equation and no big complaints when consumers save money, so what's the difference?

Did you all see that China has built the world's largest offshore solar farm, providing power for 2.6 million people?
The solar farm, developed by Guohua Investment, a unit of China Energy Investment Corp (CHN Energy), achieved full-capacity grid connection in December 2025.
Apparently the panels run cooler when over water and get 10 to 15% increase in efficiency, and they also help marine ecosystems.

Good questions, Armchair Critic.

I didn't know of the exact answer, so I looked it up to avoid looking like Try McClure in this scene of The Simpsons:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCOirUVBFW0&t=61s

Yes, labour costs matter. Lower-labour-cost countries can build infrastructure more cheaply, and that applies to all energy tech, not just renewables. It's one reason China can roll projects out so fast.

But labour isn't the whole story. Wind and solar are mostly capital-heavy rather than labour-heavy, so labour costs tend to change how cheap projects are, not which ones come out cheapest overall.

The "why not let China build it all?" angle is really an industrial policy question. We already accept that trade-off with manufactured goods. Energy's different because governments sometimes choose to pay more for local capability and control, and they make that choice whether the generation is renewable, fossil, or nuclear.

And the offshore solar project is interesting mainly because it shows how much innovation and scaling is still happening, not because it breaks the basic economics.

The costings can all be found across resources from the IEA, Lazard, and CSIRO. LCOE is a good starting point.

Will this nonsense ever stop ? There are no renewables at this stage !

""Cheap to build" is a claim about marginal costs,"

Oh so now we see JD agreeing that renewables are only cheap if you look at a small component of the picture. Cheap to build... yes. Cheap to incorporate into the grid...not so much.

"The economic fact remains that diesel used in fossil fuel production is effectively untaxed relative to other energy inputs. "

Well the diesel used to construct the various renewable facilities is also untaxed... but we won't call that a subsidy because ... reasons.

"unless retail prices fall immediately."

When the current government came into power they promised that retail prices would fall because of their policies in increase renewable penetration. They are still making that promise although the timelines have necessarily been extended.

So retail prices were the measure until they proved the claims were false and then suddenly they no longer counted. And many continue to fall for it.

No, that's not what I'm saying, mhaze.

//Oh so now we see JD agreeing that renewables are only cheap if you look at a small component of the picture.//

I'm simply restating the original claim precisely.

"Cheap to build" is a marginal cost claim. Calling that a “small component” doesn’t refute it, it just rejects the legitimacy of partial analysis unless it answers every downstream question.

//Cheap to build… yes. Cheap to incorporate into the grid… not so much.//

Those are different questions answered by different analyses.

Treating grid integration costs as a veto on marginal build costs collapses distinct metrics into one after the fact. That move has already been addressed.

//Well the diesel used to construct the various renewable facilities is also untaxed…//

Diesel used briefly during construction is not economically equivalent to diesel used continuously as an input into fossil fuel extraction and processing. One is incidental and finite, the other is structural and ongoing. So collapsing them into "both untaxed" erases the distinction that actually matters.

//When the current government came into power they promised that retail prices would fall…//

That was a political forecast, not an economic definition. It has no bearing on marginal build costs, and delayed outcomes don’t retroactively falsify LCOE or auction data.

//Retail prices were the measure until they proved the claims were false.//

Retail prices rose due to gas shocks and network costs. Evidence suggests they would have risen further without renewables already in the system. Either way, retail outcomes don’t negate marginal build-cost data.

At this point, the disagreement isn't about evidence. It's about whether different questions can have different metrics, or whether retail prices are being treated as a universal veto once outcomes disappoint.

JD what you’re doing here is repeatedly asserting that a partial metric remains valid simply because it is internally consistent, while ignoring how it is being used in practice.

No one is denying that “cheap to build” can be defined narrowly as a marginal cost claim. The objection is that this narrow claim is routinely deployed to imply broader conclusions about affordability, transition efficiency, and consumer benefit. Once that move is made, it is no longer enough to say “this answers a different question” and treat downstream costs as analytically optional.

Grid integration costs are not a retrospective veto; they are a foreseeable consequence of scale. When a technology’s marginal attractiveness increases precisely because system costs are externalised, those costs cease to be merely “downstream”. They become part of the economic reality of deploying that technology at meaningful penetration.

On diesel use, the distinction you draw is one of degree, not kind. The point is not that construction diesel equals fossil fuel combustion, but that selective exemption is being invoked to dismiss one case while normalising another. That is still an accounting choice, not a neutral clarification.

Dismissing retail prices as politically irrelevant also misses the point. They are not being used to falsify LCOE line by line, but to test whether narrowing the metric continues to track outcomes that were publicly promised on the back of those same cost claims.

The core issue isn’t whether different questions *can* have different metrics. It’s whether insisting on ever-narrower metrics once results disappoint is an act of clarification, or an attempt to protect a claim from the consequences it was always meant to support.

Graham,

You're now arguing about how a claim is sometimes used, not whether the claim itself is true.

I've been explicit throughout about scope. "Cheap to build" is a marginal generation-cost claim. If others overextend it rhetorically, that's a misuse, not a reason to declare the metric illegitimate or to treat all downstream costs as analytically prior.

System integration costs are foreseeable and modelled, which is why they appear in system plans and not in LCOE tables. A cost being foreseeable doesn't collapse all analytical layers into one, nor does it make marginal cost meaningless.

As for diesel, duration and recurrence matter. Incidental construction inputs are not economically equivalent to ongoing production inputs, and calling that distinction "accounting choice" doesn't make it arbitrary.

And retail prices test policy outcomes, not the validity of generation-cost metrics. Political promises don't determine economic definitions, and disappointed outcomes don't retroactively change cost rankings.

It seems the disagreement now is about whether a bounded claim can remain valid once others try to load it with conclusions it was never meant to carry. I think it can. You appear to think it can't. That's the crux.

The present proponents for 'renewables' are in panic mode since they realised that Silver & Gold are a much safer investment proposition than environment-destroying wind farms & solar farms.
They're desperately trying to stall the failure they conned people into investing in.
It could be this year that the fallacy collapses but by then the cons will be off the island in some untouchable tax haven.
Even the once supposedly savvy Germans are openly lamenting the haste in which they pulled down nuclear stations. They're really no smarter than a pack of Australian Greens !

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2108719873312659
That's what it seems to be all about !

Indyvidual,

That video relies heavily and Appeal to Authority fallacy, with large, unsourced numbers. She gets a lot of basic facts wrong.

For starters, the claim that wind turbines receive $600k-$900k per turbine per year in subsidies is simply false. Australia's Renewable Energy Target paid per megawatt-hour generated via certificates, not per turbine. Certificate prices varied, were capped, and declined as the scheme wound down. Converting that into a flat annual per-turbine payout requires cherry-picking peak prices, assuming unrealistically high output, and ignoring capital and operating costs.

No serious market analysis does this.

Her assertion that renewables are "reaming $40 billion a year" from the economy is even more detached from reality. Australia's entire electricity market doesn't support numbers of that scale annually. The historical cost of the RET was orders of magnitude lower.

Her technical claims are worse. Wind turbines do not draw coal-fired power to spin. They use small amounts of electricity for control systems, but when they're turning, that is wind energy being converted into electricity. The idea that wind farms are secretly powered by coal is a long-debunked myth.

The portrayal of coal plants being unable to ramp and simply "dumping steam" whenever wind output changes is outdated. That’s not how grids are run anymore. Operators forecast wind output in advance and manage it with gas, hydro, batteries, and other tools that are already part of normal system operation.

SA is repeatedly blamed for blackouts, but the major SA blackout in 2016 was caused by extreme storms and transmission failures, not wind farms. This has been established by AEMO and independent inquiries. Since then, SA has operated securely with very high renewable penetration.

Her claim that farmers carry turbine liability are also wrong. Turbines are owned, insured, and maintained by operators, not landholders.

Being a former policy adviser doesn't make someone an energy engineer or market analyst. This video contains mere political talking points, not technical or economic reality. If these claims were true, Australia's grid would already have failed. It hasn't - and that should be the first red flag.

The woman's a shonk.

I am surprised that no one has taken into account the cost of transmission
lines from the remote areas where the generation is being built.
I have seen estimates of one to two $Trillion dollars.
This is a cost solely applied to wind & solar.
They will have legal and community costs all the way.
I find it hard to believe that underground cables would be too
expensive considering underwater costs are not too expensive.

Bezza,

Transmission costs aren't being ignored, but the $1-2 trillion figure is incorrect. It's an order of magnitude higher than Australia's entire existing grid asset base.

Transmission also isn't a cost "solely applied to wind and solar". Coal plants were built near coal seams, not cities, and required major transmission too - those costs are just sunk and forgotten. Replacing ageing generation and connecting new load would require grid investment under any pathway.

AEMO's Integrated System Plan explicitly models transmission build-out, staging and cost-benefit trade-offs. The numbers are in the tens of billions over decades, not trillions, and are weighed against avoided fuel costs, coal failures and reliability risks.

Undergrounding sounds attractive, but high-voltage underground cables are far more expensive than overhead lines and are used selectively where necessary. Subsea cables are the same story.

Transmission is a real cost, it's just not the existential show-stopper it's often portrayed as.

The woman's a shonk.
John Daysh,
Of course the Govt funding chasers would say that !

Indyvidual,

Whether or not they would is irrelevant when all the figures back them up.

John Daysh,
figures backing up ?? Who told you that, Rodney Rude ?

Indyvidual,

The figures come from published market operators and system planners, not comedians.

If you think they're wrong, point to the error. Otherwise this is just noise.