Recently, Canary Media published an article titled “Don’t blame clean energy for rising electric bills.”[i] The article claims that wind and solar power are “the cheapest energy around.” There is some truth to wind and solar power being relatively inexpensive, but that’s only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. However, this blog briefly highlights a few of the inconvenient facts the article failed to mention.
To begin with, wind and solar facilities (wind farms and solar panels) that generate solar power (electricity) are not cheap. Rather, they are expensive to build. For example, replacing an average coal power plant with either wind farms or solar panels would cost almost $2 billion.[ii] Replacing Kentucky’s coal fleet with wind or solar facilities would cost almost $14 billion, and replacing the entire U.S. coal fleet with wind or solar, which is the goal of the current administration, would cost $270 billion. (These replacement costs do not take into account that wind and solar are less dependable than coal and other dispatchable electricity sources. See below.) In addition, there are huge indirect costs the article skipped over, especially the cost of new power lines that are often necessary to transmit wind or solar power to consumers. Cost estimates to add power lines for solar and wind facilities range around $200 billion, which would be in addition to the cost of wind and solar facilities themselves.[iii]
Second, wind and solar are not as dependable as other electricity sources because no other electricity source is at the mercy of the weather every day. Dependability is becoming even more important because of demands from new data centers, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, electric vehicles, and manufacturing computer chips. According to the nation’s largest electric grid operator, coal plants are 2.4 times more dependable than wind farms and 6 times more dependable than solar panels when electricity demand peaks.[iv] (Renewables also are less dependable than natural-gas and nuclear plants.) This fact means that replacing a single megawatt of coal power would require 2.4 megawatts of wind or 6 megawatts of solar power in order to have enough power when electricity demand peaks. While battery storage can improve the dependability of wind and solar, batteries cost even more than wind and solar facilities and can provide electricity for only short periods of time (4, 6, 8, or 10 hours).[v]
To illustrate the magnitude of costs, replacing the entire U.S. coal fleet with wind alone and still providing the same amount of “accredited capacity” (a measure of dependability) as the coal fleet would cost almost $650 billion.[vi] Similarly, replacing the coal fleet with solar facilities and providing the same dependability would cost more than $1.6 trillion.[vii] While these are hypothetical replacement scenarios, they still illustrate the order of magnitude for replacement costs and show that wind and solar are not cheap.
And by the way, wind farms and solar facilities require large amounts of land. Replacing Kentucky’s coal fleet with wind farms would require a land area more than three times the size of Franklin County.[viii] Solar panels would cover a fourth of Jefferson County.[ix] Replacing the entire U.S. coal fleet with wind farms would require more than 14,000 square miles of land (6.8 million football fields), and almost 2,000 square miles (almost 1 million football fields) would be required if solar panels replaced the coal fleet. This huge amount of land does not take into account that even more wind farms, solar panels, and land would be necessary to maintain the same dependability the coal fleet provides.
Each electricity source – coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro − has its advantages and disadvantages. That’s why maintaining a reliable and affordable electricity supply requires a healthy mix of resources, not overreliance on any of them. It also requires an honest assessment of all the facts, not just convenient facts, about each resource.
[i] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/dont-blame-clean-energy-for-rising-electric-bills
[ii] According to EIA, the capital cost for a typical wind facility is $1,489/kW and $1,502/kW for a solar PV facility. For simplicity, we rounded these costs to $1,500/kW for both wind and solar. An average coal plant totals approximately 1,200 MW or 1.2 million kW.
[iii] Electric Power Research Institute, “Powering Decarbonization Strategies for Net-Zero CO2 Emissions,” February 2021. EPRI estimates a cost of $200 billion for electric transmission to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2035.
[iv] According to PJM’s class ratings for its 2025/2026 base residual auction, the effective load carrying capability (a dependability metric also known as accredited capacity or capacity value) for coal is 84%, 14% for tracking solar, and 35% for onshore wind. https://www.pjm.com/-/media/planning/res-adeq/elcc/2025-26-bra-elcc-class-ratings.ashx
[v] According to EIA, a 600 MWh lithium ion battery storage system costs more than $1,700/kW compared to wind and solar facilities at $1,500/kW. See endnote 2 above.
[vi] We calculated the hypothetical cost to replace the coal fleet with wind and maintain the same level of dependability as: (180,000 MW of coal) x (1,000 kW/MW) x ($1,500/kW) x (2.6).
[vii] We calculated the hypothetical cost to replace the coal fleet with solar and maintain the same level of dependability as: (180,000 MW of coal) x (1,000 kW/MW) x ($1,500/kW) x (6).
[viii] The area that would be covered by Kentucky wind farms is calculated as: (9,180 MW of coal) x (50 acres/MW of wind). This amount of land area is based on several information sources.
[ix] The area that would be covered by Kentucky solar panels is calculated as: (9,180 MW of coal) x (7 acres/MW of solar PV). This amount of land area is based on several information sources.
