Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study

It’s almost like market forces aren’t what you want for a utility.

This seems good for investors in utility-scale batteries, since they can charge them very cheaply and sell at night.

(Although, that might not work well in Finland in the summer.)

This was one of the actual problems highlighted by the people who coined the term "duck curve" over a decade ago.

One of the main ways we've avoided this problem so far is that solar kept getting cheaper.

So it's not really a problem caused by cheap solar, it's just basic market competition, lots of supply with no barrier to entry drives prices down towards the long term marginal cost.

This is really a non-problem. Curtailment is easy and doesn't cost anything, it just needs a slightly better feedback mechanism than the current grid supplies, but honestly even a 24hr timer and ammeter would do it.

We already have this in Denmark as we have a lot of wind mills: when the wind is blowing a lot, the electricity prices goes negative!

5th October was one such day. From midnight to 17:00 the spot price was negative or zero.

Taxes and distribution costs make the consumer price a lot higher than zero.

Not if you consider that you need to either renew or add battery capacity (and panels and power electronics) after x years? Or did you take that into account?

There is small problem though - all of the people will need the last 10% at the same time. And because you need infrastructure that will work only 10 percent of the time, expect the price of kwh to be 10 times the current to compensate.

The less you need the grid - the more expensive is what you will pull from it because the infrastructure costs will be spread on fewer kwh.

$40/kWh sounds so fantastic, I can't believe it. Could you please provide a source for that price? Where will I get such cheap batteries?

My cheat code for 100 kWH is an EV that supports V2H. It's becoming supported in more cars, so I want to buy an EV as my next car. I don't anticipate battery savings and new tech reaching me faster than replacing my aging car with an EV, hence this path.

I'm in South Africa if relevant, and range anxiety is being alleviated by competition in the vehicle charging space, and municipal grid charging still comes to about 70% cheaper than fuel.

Define "real base power"? You think the grid can only operate if every generator is always-on? How do you square that with the fact that the grid is operating just fine with this stuff already?

This is a fallacy, basically. Not least because electricity is by far the most mobile traded commodity in human history. Not enough sun today where you live? Buy your power from across the continent, where they have plenty. Or from your wind generators which are working fine. Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to. Or crank up the hydro dams (most of which rarely run at 100%) a bit to handle the shortfall. Or even fire up an idle gas plant if you absolutely can't get anything else.

The idea that solar and wind aren't (sigh) "real" is a lie that someone sold you. The real world relies on a lot of this stuff already and the promised apocalypse never arrived. Go figure.

The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and operate most cheaply by pumping out at maximum efficiency 24 hours a day. You could then layer on the more expensive electricity sources that could spin up in 15 minutes or a few hours, and match the demand curve, as long as you matched baseload generators to the minimum of the demand curve, and have a cost-optimal electricity mix.

Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.

Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!

24hrs solar is already a thing that is possible for large parts of the world with lithium batteries.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

That study is already old as the prices for batteries have come down a lot more since then.

Base power isn't really all that important for solar, because its already covered by nuclear/other.

Getting "18" hours of power, thats actually important (https://timera-energy.com/blog/iberian-price-divergence-on-i...) if you can cover the evening peak, then most of your energy costs disappear.

Also, sodium batteries are now coming online. Slightly lower energy density, but potentially vastly lower cost. From looking at cost trends and increased production, it also seems pretty obvious at this point that we probably are going to get those vast quantities of battery storage everyone is so surprised about.

Fortunately other chemistries are making their way down the learning curve lithium's been on, and after a few moment reflection it would be astounding if the same types of storage that are optimal for mobile consumers also happen to be optimal for grid balancing, as daily grid balancing can be done pretty reasonably with a c rating[0] of about .2 or even .1, and as long they aren't so heavy they need to be placed on massive foundation piles, weight is not really a factor. Just need to make it as cheap as possible.

[0] battery c rating is what fraction of the battery can discharge in 1 hour https://wikibattery.org/en/wiki-us/battery/charging-rate-cha...

> The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.

I don't think it's astronomical. At most a few dozen kg per person. Compare that to the amount of steel that we produce per person just to give everybody access to cars!

And it's certainly not more astronomical than the amount of natural gas that we already extract, transport, and burn for electricity.

We have built big things in the past, there's no reason we can't do it again today. In fact, it's going to be far easier today because our tech is better and our factories' productivity is so much higher than in the past.

Grids don't need "batteries" as consumers think about them. They can store energy using gravity, for example pumping water up into a reservoir (to store) and letting it drain through a turbine using gravity (to convert back into electricity).

At grid scale, all sorts of different batteries become feasible. My favorite is the one that uses solar during the day to lift heavy objects, which then turn a generator at night when they come back down.

> The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.

Unusual events shouldn't be handled by high capex, high efficiency storage. They should be handled by lower capex, lower round trip efficiency storage (as should long term/seasonal storage).

I will once again point to Standard Thermal.

https://www.standardthermal.com/

https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy

https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html

Ten cents per kWh of storage capacity!

> On one hand, I think people underestimate how much energy our grids demand in a 24 hour cycle. The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.

but thats why you have more than one energy source right?

Even on a cloudy week, I still generate power, just not enough. Thats why I'm not truely off grid, otherwise I'd need to move from 5kwp(3 electrical) to 15kwp.

Mind you, the most expensive thing for doing that is either the inverters, or the mounts. Its got to the point that solar panels are cheaper than 18mm plywood.

I don't think it's a fair argument to say that EVs are an ineffective use of battery capacity. They are certainly more affordable and accessible than home batteries.

Have you seen the cost of home batteries? Napkin math shows their installed-cost in my region of the US is the same as the fractional cost of an EV. But the EV comes with a free drivetrain, seats, and airbags!

Totally. Grid solar and grid battery installations are gonna rock the world but rooftop solar is too bespoke and labor intensive. It goes directly against the benefit of solar’s mass manufacturing

This is true. A lot of the older panels are also rather inefficient and come with a rather poor lifespan. It's part of the reason I don't personally have any form of solar despite working in the industry.

Technology is catching up on the solar panel front though. French Heliup are producing panels which are only 5kg per square meter. Which makes them significantly easier to install on roof-tops. I imagine I'll eventually have solar panels on my roof, but I'll likely wait another decade for battery tech to also be more viable.

Australian rooftop solar is the cheapest consumer energy in history. This is despite the hardware and salaries being roughly equal to the US where the cost is about 3 times more. So it's not wise to extrapolate from US prices.

And in general, you should check your electricity bill to see how much is actually for generation vs transmission.

> Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather

That's true today, but I bet it won't be in 5 years time. Around this year or last year batteries have hit a price point where they make financial sense for ordinary people, and in a couple of years you'd be mad not to have them if you have rooftop (and somewhere to put the batteries of course).

> Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar.

At this point, it should probably go towards storage, grid capacity, or things like EV charging infrastructure. Solar generation doesn't need it.

> The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity

This may well be true, but there are positive externalities:

- It has reduced land use compared to other energy generation methods

- Power is produced near the point of use, reducing transmission requirements

- Most of the cost is labour for installation which creates jobs

Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar, I see no reason to discourage it.

The high cost of rooftop solar in the US is mostly a regulatory choice. From tariffs driving up prices significantly, to completely scattered permitting processes city-to-city, to wild swings in utility policies that make solar a good-to-bad decision overnight, it all drives costs up. So the only solar installers who survive are those who are able to swoop in when the utility policies change and can drive customer acquisition super quickly ($$$), and have massive permitting office experience that lets them deploy. That all costs a lot of money and drives out competition from the space.

So we pay something like 3x-5x for residential solar in the US versus Australia. Because we choose to as a society.

Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.

We definitely need a lot of utility scale solar, but if we want cheaper electricity we need to incentivize tons of residential solar so that we can keep our grid costs lower.

That hugely depends on the region. In my corner of the world the scheme is net-billing, so homeowners are selling energy at wholesale prices.

My friend has a 10kW setup combined with a 10kWh battery. Main adjustment he made was prevent the heat pump from keeping the water hot during the night, as that was just wasting energy.

After this adjustment his electricity bills halved despite only really selling energy in the peak of the summer season. The savings translate to a 10-year return on investment before subsidies.

I think you’re missing the real-politik of rooftop installations. The person installing the panel has a few square meters of empty and unproductive space, over which they have exclusive construction rights. And which is already connected to a grid, with capacity to absorb its production, physically close to the consumers of its output.

That combination of factors is fairly rare in most of Europe & North America - especially when you’re looking for multiple contiguous kilometres of land for utility scale solar. There’s a lot of that type of land out in Texas and Australia, but there’s much less of it in the Scottish Highlands.

It's not as bad as all that.

Solar "subsidies" are almost universally tax credits, meaning the only money involved is the money paid by the homeowners. So, for society, rooftop solar is by far the cheapest option. It costs the rest of us nothing, the homeowners pay for it.

Money is also not limited, it is in fact created by the banks when someone takes a loan, for example to put solar on their roofs.

Meaning there is no money lost from society that could instead be used to build utility solar, just because someone puts solar on their roofs. If your county borrows money to make utility solar, that money is also created by the bank then and there.

Also note that you are quoting last years Lazard report. Solar is way cheaper in this year's report. It will probably be even cheaper in the next one.

> Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather

I've posted this several times here, but I think it's worth responding to claims like this, as they are plain wrong.

I had a house with a 4.8kWh battery, and 6.6kW of panels. Just our overnight consumption was over 4.8kWh, so I purchased a generator "in case". Later during a period of high rainfall, we got flooded in for a week. The authorities cut off the power because of risks, so no power for a week. It was a once in a decade rain event, so "inclement weather" understates it.

In that week I learnt what a little adaption can do to your electricity consumption. We never used the generator. We did stopped bulk heating water, and of course all house heating / cooling was turned off. That was about the only life style changes from memory - well perhaps no 2 hour roasts in the oven.

Turns out even in inclement weather the sun does peek through occasionally, and when it does you can do high power consuming activities like wash clothes. It also turns out solar panels don't shut off under overcast conditions, they just drop to about 20% capacity - which means for us they output 1kW most of the day. And that turns out to be more than enough to charge the 4.8kWh battery, and that battery more than enough to power the refrigerators, lights, computers, TV's, fans, and microwave overnight.

4.8kWh is stuff all of course. Yet it suffices to get you through during a once in a decade event.

We've built a new house now, and have 40kWh battery (oddly cost us the same as the 4.8kWh). We also have 32kW panels. They will generate 6.4kW during inclement weather. Do you see the implications of this?

If the electricity bill doesn't remain in credit, we will just disconnect. Why wouldn't it remain in credit you ask? It's because you can't sell power when the sun is shining where I live, as the solar duck curve forces the price to go negative. There is a $2/day flat cost for being connected to the grid, even if you draw nothing. So we have to sell $2 of electricity every day for being connected to remain viable.

I think perhaps we will, but only because of the battery. When the grid suffers some outage the price spikes by a factor of around 100. That almost never happens when the sun is shining of course, because the solar over capacity just shoulders the load. But when those coal fired generators trip during the night (which they regularly do), you get to make some real money from the battery capacity.

There's also the problem of rural opposition to solar farms. Not unusual to see a "no solar farms" sign every few hundred feet in some parts of Indiana where I wander (often in the same areas where the cars have bumper stickers celebrating coal).

I assume astroturfing is at play.

Where are your calculations? It's hard for anyone to comment without seeing your cost/benefit analysis.

Lets do some simple napkin math: Lets say a solar system will cost $25k (that should get you an 8-10kW rooftop system). Pay for it with, say, a 5% APR loan.

- 10 years: $265/mo

- 15 years: $197/mo

- 20 years: $164/mo

What are your current monthly electricity costs, and what time horizon gets you a good break-even?

Also consider what electricity costs are gonna do. The loan locks in a monthly cost, but electricity rates have lately been increasing around 3% per year. Say you currently have a $150 monthly electricity bill... in 10, 15, and 20 years that will be $202, $233, and $270/mo.

There's other ways to finance it (PPA's, leases, maybe incentives if we get serious about our energy again someday, etc.) that have their own advantages/disadvantages, but even this simple approach shows there's some wins depending on your exact consumption, time horizon, time-value of money, and what you expect your electric load to do (will you get an EV? will you adopt heat pumps? will you need to start using way more AC in the summers? etc)

The median cost/benefit of home solar is good, but not great. It tends to be a good investment, but not hugely different from other possibilities.

But the variance is huge.

Depends on the state/city. In Minnesota with cheap electricity and not a ton of sun it's still worth it, just takes a while to recoup. In places in california you can recoup costs in as little as 2 years sometimes because the rates are so high.

The biggest benefits are in the later years due to utility escalation rates. Compounded growth rate of 4-6% does wonders 20 years later!

I’m in Canada , in a tight valley where it snows a ton. I pay 13 cents a kWh for electricity.

I installed 7.8kw of rooftop solar for $8k out of pocket, all of which is on a ten year interest free loan.

In 12 months it makes smack on $1000 worth of electricity. So my payback is 8 years ( less, actually. The price of electricity here is already pre approved to increase no less than 5% a year) After that I get $1000 of power per year for twenty or so years.

The term no brainer doesn’t seem enough.

As usual, nothing, and not covering storage either.

So it's cheapest in sun peak, when it's sunny

I'm not sure how practical that would be. Transmitting power over distances incurs losses.

I did see a proposal to build out solar in Africa and pipe it undersea to Europe. That seemed wild, and, predictably, it got canned for its impracticality.

Edit - it looks like there are several such proposals, and that they're not all cancelled:

Several travel across the Mediterranean:

https://gregy-interconnector.gr/index_en.html

https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0210-49221-egypt-...

Here's the one I thought was cancelled, which travels along the western coast of Africa to the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

https://thenational-the-national-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/...

Why transmit it rather than just storing the unused power for later near the source?

To transmit power you will need battery storage on both sides of long distance power lines. We never build enough of them, but if you can peak shave and trough fill with stored power, you increase the MWH per day available on the far end.

Solar tends to come with battery storage. But you could also just build the battery storage.

The Pan-European grid is already reality. The fluctuating generation costs between e.g. the Nordics and mainland Europe are already driving investment into undersea HVDC cables.

But California has this: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook

Storage is not needed. You can consume solar power as it's generated, and it is as useful then as if it came from oil, gas or coal.

When the sun goes down, you have saved tons of oil, gas and goal that didn't have to burn during the day. Which is very very good. You don't have to "solve nighttime" before solar makes sense, it makes sense immediately.

Edit: And of course, nighttime is also being solved, in many ways, already.

New energy generation from solar is cheaper. New energy generation from solar plus storage is cost competitive with natural gas peaker plants. By how much depends on the region.

Of course. That's the major cost (along with inverters and mounting and installation). If you didn't include that, if you just looked at operating costs, solar would be insanely cheap, far cheaper than any other source.

I dug down trying to get the actual paper and it appears it's a pre-print with only the abstract available (but maybe I wasn't looking in the right spot).

That being said, the quotes from the author were more to the point of it being a milestone that in the UK that Solar+Battery systems were now less expensive than gas/coal.

To my understanding, this is a milestone vs "raw" production numbers, which you're correct in saying have had solar as the cheapest option for years.

Wouldn't it depend a lot on where you live in terms of weather and/or required pollution controls?

Do you think those are significantly different for solar versus other technologies? Seems they would be right in line with anything else...

Is there a form of power that doesn't have these? A coal plant has all these plus fuel costs, workers to run the plant, parts for the turbines, and ash disposal to deal with.

Transmission is more of a problem with the centralized forms of power generation? So transmission should be a net positive for solar?

Construction and disposal I'm not sure to be honest, intuitively I don't think those are much more expensive.

It doesn't exclude construction. The abstract says they analyzed levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). LCOE includes investments, operations, and fuel, so it includes construction.

Also storage

Land is also spoiled and occupied for fossil fuel extraction, refinement, and distribution. And at least you can be within the near vicinity of solar panels without experiencing significant health issues, so we need to tabulate the very real public health costs too when comparing. I highly doubt there is a solar equivalent of “Cancer Alley” in the US. Another consideration is that we can slap solar panels on top of existing structures, which you cannot do with fossil fuel at any stage.

I don’t doubt that the costs are considerable but if we’re going to go down that path we need to make sure it’s applied across the board here and I imagine the gap is not as bad as you’re implying. I’m going off my gut though so I could be entirely wrong.

Because solar (for example) can often go on rooftops so not needing new land. And solar and wind are often good in remote areas where population is low and land is cheap.

Because land doesn't need to be vacant to develop solar?

Residential or industrial rooftops are perfect examples. Heck, sound barriers along freeways etc are now even profitable

Because the land cost and amount needed is immaterial. Solar and wind actually contribute to the tax base where it is colocated, tax revenue that would otherwise not be provided (depending on jurisdiction). People overvalue land for some reason, most of the world is not Manhattan or Hong Kong. The US farms 60 million acres for corn and soybean for biofuels alone, for example, and of course that land is much more efficiently used if solar PV is installed for energy.

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/10/solar-panels-half-th...

https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-first-...

Edit: your comment has changed a bit, so let me address the new sentence here:

> I don't understand. Why is it that in every single discussion about power- and in particular, solar power- is the cost of land omitted ?

You are incorrect that land costs are omitted; in fact I don't recall any sort of cost comparison that has ever omitted land costs, whether it's from Lazard or NREL or anywhere else. It's part of the CapEx, or as rent, or however it's modeled. NREL in particular looks at overall costs on completed and built systems. Further, the developers building these things know the land costs very well.

Can you point to a discussion or paper where land cost was not included? If it's still an open discussion I'd love to add the high quality solar-is-cheapest studies that all include land costs.

And as for this particular study:

First, doesn't omit the cost of land. Secondly land is only the most important resource in very very few markets. Razing skyscrapers in Manhattan would be a bad idea. Instead of farming crops or the sun in Manhattan, it's done elsewhere and shipped in.

PV is fairly unique in that land is not required. It can be installed over existing land uses such as rooftops, canals, parking.

It's also not clear if they factored in battery costs. They mention lithium battery costs have also decreased in cost but not clear if its included. Batteries are a requirement for consistently delivering solar power. You cant just flip the sun on and off.

It's been included in every one I've read. You're not going to find it in broad surveys like this one, because it's a survey. They'll average together the cost of hundreds of projects. But when you look at the projects individually that were the sources, land acquisition is part of the capital costs or land lease is part of the operating costs.

What's the cite for solar requiring "massive amounts of land and taxes"? That doesn't square with the back of my envelope but I'd be willing to look at numbers.

Because the land is already owned for the most part?

Why are we assuming that the cost of land isn't included in their LCoE calculation?

Why are you saying land is not included in the cost calculations? I've not read this particular study, but every study looking at the cost of electricity generation I have seen in recent years, essentially looked at investment/returns which obviously includes land use cost. The reason why it's not a big topic, is because it's generally not a big contributor to overall cost, the main drivers being panels and construction. Incidentally, the main power sources where things are not included in the cost are nuclear (typically risk for major accidents is taken on by the government, as no insurance will do it, waste storage cost is often capped as well incalculations) and fossils (health effects of pollution, CO2...).

The cost of land is usually omitted in casual discussions because it's not a significant driver of cost for solar. Quantitative cost breakdowns do include it. See for example https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost..., where the cost estimate for a US$200 million 150-megawatt-AC solar plant in 02019 (six years ago) included US$133,000 per year in land leasing costs, one fourth the cost of "module cleaning" and one sixth the cost of "preventative maintenance".

However, not every single discussion does omit it. For example, we were discussing this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487268 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487197, where my calculation was that even in solar-unfavorable places like the northern extreme of Germany, the cost of land barely reaches the same order of magnitude as the cost of the solar modules, even at today's record-low module prices. US$72 million of the US$200 million of the estimate mentioned above was the modules themselves, but today that would be closer to US$15 million.

The atom of truth in your confused assertion is that solar farms do take up enormous amounts of land compared to other kinds of power plants. But, at current human energy consumption levels, it's still only a tiny amount of overall land.

I'm assuming from your past submission history that you're in the US, because you mostly only post US politics stuff. The US generates about 4200 TWh electric per year, which is 480 gigawatts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...). Under the 2000kWh/year/kWp conditions prevailing in the Californian Mojave Desert, parts of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, according to https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali..., this would require about 2.1 terawatts (peak) of solar panels. A square meter of 22%-efficient solar panel produces 220 watts, peak, so this is about 9600 square kilometers, a 110-kilometer-diameter circle. (Although, if you don't leave spaces between the panels, you have to make them horizontal so they don't shade each other; in practice people set them further apart to use more land but less panels.)

How big is that?

It's almost 0.1% of the US, not counting the space between the panels. It's a little over twice the diameter of the VLA radio telescope in western New Mexico, a facility you might remember from the movie Contact. It's slightly larger than White Sands Missile Range (8300km²). It's 15 times the size of Lake Mead, which was created by Hoover Dam to generate electricity. It's about two thirds the size of California's Death Valley National Park (13'793km²). It would take up one eighth of the Navajo Reservation.

Almost everywhere in the US has at least half that much sunlight. Suppose you wanted to site the panels near Springport, Michigan, for some reason. You only have 1200 kWh/year/kWp there, so you need 16000km². The panels would cover a ten-county area centered on Jackson County; they would reach Lansing, and might reach from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo.

In real life, it wouldn't be a good idea to put it all in one place like that, both because it's fragile and because it creates higher transmission-line losses; it's better to put the panels closer to where they're used, which implies spreading them apart. So probably 0.2% of every state. In an average-sized state like Iowa (145'746km²) it might be 300km², 20% of the size of an average-sized county like Hamilton County. To power the whole state.

But try to keep perspective on the total amount of land we're talking about here: White Sands Missile Range, two thirds of Death Valley, or a small part of the Navajo Reservation to power the whole country.

I'm generally pro nuclear and think it should be a significant part of the energy mix. But an interesting point is that the floor price of nuclear is the cost of the turbines, which are surprisingly expensive, and aren't really getting cheaper. Solar can go much cheaper than that, potentially at least. More on this point in the recent Casey Handmer interview of Dwarkesh.

Not being able (or willing) to turn turn nukes down or off to load-follow makes them sometimes as difficult to work with as intermittents. None in the GB grid load-follow, though one can AFAIK. And nukes need refuelling, so you need to fill in those generation gaps. And one of the last two big grid stumbles in the GB (UK) in the last ~20Y was caused by a big nuke (Sizewell B) tripping, so nukes can be big single points of failure too.

Note: I am pro nukes in the mix, but nukes have difficult points too.

There are two approved sites for AP1000 reactors to be built, Turkey Point in FL and Summer in SC, all regulatory hurdles have been passed. Yet no one wants to take the risk to build them, not because of regulation but because industry can't control construction costs.

Nuclear is far inferior in that it is too costly, despite that putative advantage. The value of being able to run 24/7 doesn't make up for the unaffordably high cost of building the plants.