And renewables aren't cheaper, are they...
On the whole they are cheaper. This is actually quite complicated and I've spent hundreds of hours researching and analyzing it. This is not investment advice; don't sue me if you invest based on it and I'm wrong.
But basically renewables are cheaper.
The first thing to understand is what competes with what. Solar doesn't compete directly with oil.
Oil competes with electric cars for transportation fuel. Electric cars are already cheaper to operate; it's just a matter of making them cheaper upfront.
Oil competes with natural gas (methane) and biofuels for a chemical feedstock, and oil is losing; it's too expensive even at $20/bbl.
Oil competes with natgas and electricity for home heating. Oil has already priced itself out of this market. Natgas is still cheaper than electricity, but not much cheaper -- electrical heating has gotten much more efficient over the years. If the natgas price heads back to $8, heating with an electric heat pump will be cheaper.
Natgas competes with electricity for cooking, but it's a marginal, tiny market.
Oil generates electricity in Hawaii, but only islands do this. Oil is just too expensive to generate electricity with; everything else is cheaper.
Coal, by contrast, "thermal" coal, is basically used only for electrical generation. (The "metallurgical" coal used for steel is literally a different type of coal and does not compete in the same market.) Coal prices at the minehead are dropping to zero due to lack of demand, but coal prices at the power plant remain high, because the coal has to be *transported*, and carrying rocks around is expensive. The railroads have other more valuable things they would prefer to run on their train lines and the transportation cost of coal is rising, not falling.
In electrical generation, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, coal, and natgas compete. Oil has priced itself out of the market even at $20/bbl. These include both old *fully paid off plants* and *new plants*. Obviously fully-paid-off solar, wind, and hydro cost basically nothing -- they generate electricity nearly for free. The others have costs.
New nuclear has priced itself out of the market completely. Old nuclear has basically priced itself out of the market too, but they're desparately squablling over trying to get subsidies to keep going.
New coal has priced itself out of the market as well (remember those transportation costs?).
Old coal has mostly priced itself out of the market too. In addition to the transportation costs, old coal plants are mostly *less efficient* than new coal plants (waste more). They're also trying to get government subsidies to keep operating.
There isn't much new hydro because we've used all the good hydro locations.
New onshore wind power in good locations is already cheaper than everything, including paid-off coal and paid-off natgas.
New solar at utility scale is currently competing mainly with natgas. In sunny areas, new solar is cheaper. In low-sun areas, it isn't yet, but it probably will be in within three years. And that's assuming natgas stays cheap, which it won't.
New *rooftop* solar is competing with the *retail* rates. In this case it's cheaper in areas with expensive utility rates and more expensive in areas with low utility rates. The utility rates are mainly a function of the utility's attitude -- whether the utility is big into hydro and wind (cheap), or doubling down on obsolete nuclear (very expensive) and siphoning profits off for CEOs.
Then there are batteries. At *utility scale*, they're competing to provide for sudden short-term power spikes against "peaker plants" which are very inefficient natural gas plants, and the batteries are cheaper. At home scale, they're competing with the cost of distribution, which largely depends on utiliity company attitude, as I said. Eventually batteries will be competing with transmission lines at utility scale and the transmission lines are probably cheaper.
One problem we're facing is that utilities keep throwing money into obsolete fossil fuel generation, even though that's a big waste of ratepayer money. A tax on that generation might wake up the utilities and get them to put their money in renewables which are the future.
