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.