Solar and Wind Power Are Expensive

Politicians—supported by powerful green energy interests and credulous journalists—keep gaslighting voters claiming green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels.

Global evidence is clear: Adding more solar and wind to the energy supply pushes up the price of electricity for consumers and businesses. Families in Ontario know this already from their bitter experience: from 2005, the Ontario government began phasing out coal energy and dived headlong into subsidizing wind and solar generation.

Those green policies led to a sharp hike in electricity prices. From 2005 to 2020 the average, inflation-adjusted cost of electricity doubled from 7.7 cents to 15.3 cents. Since 2019 the Ontario government has subsidized these high costs through a slew of programs like the “Renewable Cost Shift”, lowering the direct pain to ratepayers but simply moving the increasing costs onto the government coffers. Today, this policy costs Ontario more than $6 billion annually, four-times what was being spent in 2018.

A relatively small amount of wind energy costs Ontarians over a billion dollars each year. One peer-reviewed study finds that the economic costs of wind are at least three times their benefits. Only the owners of wind power make any money, whereas the “losers are primarily the electricity consumers followed by the governments.”

Yet, politicians—supported by powerful green energy interests and credulous journalists—keep gaslighting voters claiming green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels.

They argue fundamentally that the green transition is not just cheap but even that it makes money, because wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels.

At best, this is only true when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. At all other times, their cost is significantly higher. Modern societies need around-the-clock power. The intermittency of solar and wind energy means backup is required, often delivered by fossil fuels. That means citizens end up paying for two power systems: renewables and their backup. Moreover, much more transmission is needed to ensure wind and solar reach users, and backup fossil fuels, as they are used less, have even fewer hours to earn back their capital costs. Both increase costs further.

This intermittency can be huge, as when solar power in the Yukon delivered a massive 150 times more electricity to the grid in May 2022 than it did in December 2022. It is also the reason that the real energy costs of solar and wind are far higher than green campaigners claim. Just look around the world to see how that plays out.

One study shows that in China, when including the cost of backup power, the real cost of solar power becomes twice as high as that of coal. Similarly, a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows that the real costs of solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels. Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Denmark, all of which increasingly rely on solar and wind power, have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.

Source: IEA.org energy prices data set

This is borne out by the actual costs paid across the world. The International Energy Agency’s latest data from nearly 70 countries from 2022 shows a clear correlation between more solar and wind and higher average household and business energy prices. In a country with little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is about 16 cents per kilowatt-hour. For every 10 per cent increase in solar and wind share, the electricity cost increases by nearly 8 cents per kWh. The results are substantially similar for 2019, before the impacts of Covid and the Ukraine war.

In Germany, electricity costs 43 cents per kWh—much more than twice the Canadian cost, and more than three-times the Chinese price. Germany has installed so much solar and wind that on sunny and windy days, renewable energy satisfies close to 70 per cent of Germany’s needs—a fact the press eagerly reports. But the press hardly mentions dark and still days, when these renewables deliver almost nothing. Twice in the past couple of months, when it was cloudy and nearly windless, solar and wind delivered less than 4 per cent of the daily power Germany needed.

Current battery technology is insufficient. Germany’s entire battery storage runs out in about 20 minutes. That leaves more than 23 hours of energy powered mostly by fossil fuels. Last month, with cloudy skies and nearly no wind, Germany faced the costliest power prices since the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with wholesale prices reaching a staggering $1.40 per kWh.

Canada is blessed with plentiful hydro, powering 58 per cent of its electricity. This means that there has been less drive to develop wind and solar, which deliver just 7 per cent. But the urge to virtue signal remains. Indeed, the federal government’s 2023 vision for the electricity system declares that shifting away from fossil fuels is a “scientific and moral imperative” and “the greatest economic opportunity of our lifetime”.

Yet the biggest take-away from the global evidence is that among all the nations in the world—many with very big, green ambitions—there is not one that gets much of its power from solar and wind and has low electricity costs. The lower-right of the chart is simply empty.

Instead, there are plenty of nations with lots of green energy and exorbitantly high costs.

Bjørn Lomborg

Related Topics:#BjornLomborg #FraserInstitute #SolarPower #WindPower ElectricityPrices HotAirColdTruths SolarAndWIndAreExpensive

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Canada Caves: Carney ditches digital services tax after criticism from Trump

Published on June 30, 2025

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Brett Rowland

Canada caved to President Donald Trump demands by pulling its digital services tax hours before it was to go into effect on Monday.

Trump said Friday that he was ending all trade talks with Canada over the digital services tax, which he called a direct attack on the U.S. and American tech firms. The DST required foreign and domestic businesses to pay taxes on some revenue earned from engaging with online users in Canada.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” the president said. “We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

By Sunday, Canada relented in an effort to resume trade talks with the U.S., it’s largest trading partner.

“To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States,” according to a statement from Canada’s Department of Finance.

Canada’s Department of Finance said that Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump agreed to resume negotiations, aiming to reach a deal by July 21.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday that the digital services tax would hurt the U.S.

“Thank you Canada for removing your Digital Services Tax which was intended to stifle American innovation and would have been a deal breaker for any trade deal with America,” he wrote on X.

Earlier this month, the two nations seemed close to striking a deal.

Trump said he and Carney had different concepts for trade between the two neighboring countries during a meeting at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, in the Canadian Rockies.

Asked what was holding up a trade deal between the two nations at that time, Trump said they had different concepts for what that would look like.

“It’s not so much holding up, I think we have different concepts, I have a tariff concept, Mark has a different concept, which is something that some people like, but we’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it today.”

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs for allowing fentanyl and migrants to cross their borders into the U.S. Trump later applied those 25% tariffs only to goods that fall outside the free-trade agreement between the three nations, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump put a 10% tariff on non-USMCA compliant potash and energy products. A 50% tariff on aluminum and steel imports from all countries into the U.S. has been in effect since June 4. Trump also put a 25% tariff on all cars and trucks not built in the U.S.

Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.

Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families, and pay down the national debt.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods paid by the person or company that imports them. The importer can absorb the cost of the tariffs or try to pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Trump’s tariffs give U.S.-produced goods a price advantage over imported goods, generating revenue for the federal government.

Brett Rowland

Investigative Reporter

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Trump on Canada tariff deadline: ‘We can do whatever we want’

Published on June 29, 2025

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Brett Rowland

President Donald Trump appears unconcerned about an upcoming tariff deal deadline after abruptly ending all trade talks with Canada as his bid to overhaul world trade continues.

Trump is nearing the end of a self-imposed 90-day deadline to strike deals with nearly every U.S. trading partner as he works to reorder global trade by giving America a competitive advantage through tariffs on foreign goods.

Trump now says that the deadline could be extended past July 9 or even accelerated.

“We can do whatever we want. We could extend it, we could make it shorter. I’d like to make it shorter,” Trump said Friday at the Oval Office. “I’d like to just send letters out to everyone ‘Congratulations, you’re paying 25%.'”

On April 2, Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on nearly every nation that trades with the U.S. Seven days later, he paused those higher tariff rates for 90 days to give his trade team time to cut deals with key trading partners. That 90-day deadline ends July 9 and thus far Trump has brought home two deals: A limited trade pact with the United Kingdom and a trade truce with China.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Bloomberg that new deals are on the way, and those could serve as models for others.

“We’re going to do top 10 deals, put them in the right category, and then these other countries will fit behind,” Lutnick said.

He said the U.S. was “close to the finish line” with India. Lutnick also said he had made an offer to the European Union.

Trump’s decision to suspend trade talks with Canada with just days left before the deadline underscored the flexibility of the president’s trade deadline.

“These are very complex negotiations and we are going to continue them in the best interests of Canadians,” Candian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday while leaving his office, according to local reports.

Canada has invariably been one of the top two trading partners for the United States for years. In 2024, Canada was the top destination for U.S. exports and the third-largest source of U.S. imports. On the other side, Canada exported 75% of its goods to the United States and imported almost half of its goods from the United States.

U.S. total goods trade with Canada was an estimated $762.1 billion in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. U.S. goods exports to Canada in 2024 were $349.4 billion. U.S. imports from Canada in 2024 totaled $412.7 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada was $63.3 billion in 2024.

Services trade with Canada, exports and imports, totaled an estimated $140.3 billion in 2023. Services exports were $86.0 billion, and services imports were $54.3 billion. The U.S. services trade surplus with Canada was $31.7 billion in 2023, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Trump put a stop to the talks on Friday.

“We have just been informed that Canada, a very difficult Country to TRADE with, including the fact that they have charged our Farmers as much as 400% Tariffs, for years, on Dairy Products, has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies, which is a direct and blatant attack on our Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump said the digital services tax was a copy of a European Union proposal.

Earlier this month, the two nations seemed close to striking a deal.

Trump said he and Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney had different trade concepts between the two neighboring countries during a meeting at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, in the Canadian Rockies.

Asked what was holding up a trade deal between the two nations at that time, Trump said they had different concepts for what that would look like.

The tariffs have frustrated Canadian leaders and residents. Tensions between the two neighboring countries have been high. And cities on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border have been affected.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada join the U.S. as its 51st state. He previously called former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor” regularly.