I looked into this electricity cost structure and economics recently and was surprised at what I found.  Fed tax credits for wind and solar are going away this year.  

Unsubsidized, commercial scale wind and solar are still the cheapest source for new electrical power.  With battery backups, they are still the cheapest source of new power.  Cheaper than a new natural gas turbine plant, according to the big investment groups, and natural gas only in the running because fracking lowered the cost of natural gas to 25% of what it was before shale oil and fracking.  How long will that natural gas cost structure last?  Who knows, sure has benefitted me and America.

Economics generally say you would run an existing natural gas plant wide open, cheaper than new renewables.  You would never build a new nuke plant with existing tech, simply not price competitive in the current market.  Tech would have to improve such that the upfront cost of permitting and installation was less.  Coal way too expensive.

Battery/storage tech keeps improving and can be retrofitted to existing renewable energy sites.

Tax code changes to accelerate depreciation and depletion for oil and gas continue to be baked into the tax code for the last hundred years.  Which has been and continues to be good for America, I think.  Just like accelerated depreciation is investment friendly for all sorts of renewable energy and other general business.


I was just sort of overall surprised at what I found.

Look up Lazard on renewable energy costs and levelized cost of energy.



I thought the Texas ERCOT thing had been hashed out years ago.  Deregulation forced the cost of electricity down (market risk takers) to the point where winterization investments for power sources were not affordable or cost competitive for electricity suppliers.  Then the consequences of those risks were encountered by the market participants, on the supplier and consumer side.  What I haven’t seen is any analysis of the consumer cost savings due to lower power prices in the run up to the big freeze vs the cost of fixing frozen infrastructure (burst pipes etc) and the loss of economic output while everything shut down for however long it was, a week or two.