What That Flashy Renewable Energy Paper Got Wrong

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https://www.nrdc.org/experts/amanda-levin/what-flashy-renewable-energy-study-got-wrong

What That Flashy Renewable Energy Paper Got Wrong
April 25, 2019 Amanda Levin

The costs of wind and solar energy keep falling; installing a new wind turbine costs about a third of what it did in 2008. Solar prices fell by 88 percent during that time. In fact, renewable energy is so inexpensive, utilities have found that they can save customers money by closing coal plants early and replacing them with wind and solar power.

It’s against this backdrop that we must consider the much-hyped new paper from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute analyzing the impact of state renewable energy standards. The economists looked at these state efforts to boost solar and wind deployment (dating back to 1990) and conclude that these so-called RPS programs are costly and ineffective at addressing climate change.

But there are many reasons to be skeptical of these conclusions.

And this isn’t the first paper to look at the impact of renewable energy standards, but it is one of the few to find such high costs. The Energy Department’s national labs have done their own large-scale studies each year and found that these polices drive significant renewable energy development at low costs for customers—about 2 percent of an U.S. household’s average monthly bill (or a little more than $2 a month). And the benefits are enormous: They could top $1 trillion—yes, trillion with a T—by 2030.

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