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.