Missing from that very first graph appears to be New Zealand. Our electricity price is probably on par with US cents per kwh, and we're at 85% or more renewable... that would just about put us down in the "No Cheap Renewable" portion of that deluded lying graph.
I appreciate your attempts to link energy prices to renewables. However, prices are often misleading or incomplete as indicators of total cost. There have been significant periods when European wholesale prices have been negative - when generators paid someone to use their electricity. Julien Jomaux has written about this extensively (most recently https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/what-has-been-the-impact-of-solar). This certainly doesn't mean that consumers are seeing negative prices - it reflects the fact that public policy requires utilities to buy all available "green" power; for hours with more green power than total demand, this leads to grid operators paying other generators to go off line. Julien Jomaux has also documented this topic, but focuses mainly on the impact on business cases for investors. The cost of operating the grid also includes "ancillary services" of several types, including load balancing; systems with a lot of renewable generation require more of these ancillary services - Julien Jomaux has written extensively about this as well.
About 75% of German electric bills comes from levies, charges, and taxes (https://www.germanledtech.de/en/news/electricity-bill-simply-explained/). These are all charged as cents per kWh, which explains why German retail electric prices are so high. These charges include fees of about 7.5 cents per kWh explicitly for green energy.
Portugal has about the same renewables percent as Germany and much lower retail prices. In Portugal, the only parts of the bill that vary with consumption are the generating charge and VAT (https://www.realestate-algarve.info/posts/electricity/). Other fees and charges are fixed amounts per customer; I can't tell from my ten minutes' research whether these fixed prices include any green energy charges, but the point is that they don't go into the cost per kWh, which goes a long way toward explaining why Portugal's retail prices are lower than Germany's.
I respect your abilities and credentials as a climate scientist. But it might be better to leave explorations of the cost of energy to people more familiar with electricity markets and pricing, or at least to people willing to spend some effort researching the topic.
"it might be better to leave explorations of the cost of energy to people more familiar with electricity markets and pricing"
LOL, no. An alternative is for you to unsubscribe and not read our substack. But, of course, that will never happen. You love being outraged by my analysis.
Outraged? Not at all. I enjoy seeing a variety of perspectives, including from people I disagree with. That's how I learn, and how I sharpen my own arguments. When I present an argument, my objective is to be respectful of those who disagree, perhaps get them to reconsider some aspect of their own position, and to provide material that can be a useful basis for others' investigations. For people who agree with me, I hope to provide material that will give them better understanding.
I don't intend to unsubscribe. If you find my remarks offensive, you are under no obligation to respond, but I would genuinely appreciate any substantive responses you make - I might learn something from them.
He' OK. He's just another nerd with some outside expertise.
Anyway, he's never once compared your posts to a load of fetid dingo's kidneys, which you should be prepared for from the likes of fervent climate denialists.
"This certainly doesn't mean that consumers are seeing negative prices - it reflects the fact that public policy requires utilities to buy all available "green" power; for hours with more green power than total demand, this leads to grid operators paying other generators to go off line. "
----
Policy wonks have discovered that subsidies are needed to goose the transition to RE, especially considering both the ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels and the extensive activity on behalf of FF industries to undermine and demonize wind and solar at the local level.
Conversely, some utilities have been →contractually bound← to pay more for coal power than cheaper RE. At the source, solar/wind/storage is typically much cheaper than fossil thermal when it's available, but there are a lot of long term contracts, politics, taxes and other overhead to obscure the signal.
If you're referring to externalities, I assume you're thinking of some "social cost of carbon." Do you have a figure in mind? If not, how would you balance the external costs against the benefits from using fossil fuels?
Climate change is hurting crop yields due to too much or too little rain, higher temps (especially at night) and stalled weather in general. One good crop year for American farmers (2022) had them optimistic about selling into the shortages elsewhere on the planet...except that the Mississippi River was running so low that the barges had to run lighter to keep from grounding, raising the cost.
Is there anywhere where crop yields are improving *because* of climate change?
I suppose people using greenhouses for many decades are completely delusional! Higher levels of CO2 benefits many crops. Some crops do better with higher temperatures. Some may not but farmers can (and do) move the locations where they grow.
"I suppose people using greenhouses for many decades are completely delusional! Higher levels of CO2 benefits many crops."
----
When plants are crowded into an enclosed structure, they're all "breathing" from the same limited volume of air. They absorb CO2 (and a little O2) but beyond a certain level, too high a buildup of their waste oxygen is bad for them. Of course people maintaining full commercial greenhouses find better results when they pump in more CO2 for them. Duh.
In the same way, pack a bunch of mammals in an enclosed space, and they do better with extra oxygen. Not only that, but high levels of CO2 are toxic. This is why CO2 "scrubbers" are critical on submarines and space stations. The "choking" sensation when people are suffocating is not from lack of oxygen but excess CO2 (which is why people can calmly suffocate in a room full of nitrogen or helium).
If you advocate complete decarbonization, you should recognize that this would mean much less mechanization, much less fertilizers, and less irrigation in many areas. It seems that the advocated cure would be much worse than the disease. Or are you advocating something else?
I was responding to the comment that was reminiscent of the old "CO2 is plant fuel" denialist refrain, where that was given in response to the warnings about global warming.
I have no delusion that humans will come anywhere near a responsible handling of reducing greenhouse gas *emissions*, much less pulling meaningful amounts CO2 out of the atmosphere. "Complete decarbonization" is impossible, because humans are stupidly, tribally political creatures.
The best I can advocate is "stop digging". For example, the ethanol corn subsidy is an *abomination* under the pretense that it is somehow green when it's really just political pork, but I don't know how to stop it. Cutting and burning the Amazon to grow cattle is not going to stop. Private jets produce upwards of 5 times as much CO2/passenger than commercial jets (which is bad enough), but the people who can afford to fly private won't ever stop. Coastal cities are going to make futile efforts (at great expense) to hold back the sea instead of acknowledging reality that property values and associated property tax revenues will spiral down (nobody is in greater functional denial than coastal city realtors).
What are these "ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels", and are any of them in the US?
Which utilities have been contractually bound to pay more for coal than for cheaper RE? When were these contracts set up, by whom, and why? Can you give me a few examples?
When you say solar/wind/storage is much cheaper than fossil thermal, are you referring to marginal cost? If so, I completely agree. The problem with looking only at marginal cost is that people who are paid only marginal cost never make any money to pay for their capital investment, so they will never make the investment. The rules which govern the grid certainly have some perverse incentives, rent seeking, and legacy costs and contracts distorting the market. Regulators are supposed to set the rules to protect the public, but of course they are more likely to be sympathetic to industry participants (whom they know and have long relationships with) than with consumers.
I thought I'd give Grok a try with Brian's decarbonization-alarmist memes, since Grok is supposed to be purged of 'wokeness'. I entered the following single sentence at https://grok.com/chat.
"What are these "ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels", and are any of them in the US?"
"Yes, the United States provides ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels, both explicit and implicit. In 2022, total U.S. fossil fuel subsidies were estimated at $757 billion, with $3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in implicit subsidies (e.g., unpriced health and environmental costs). Below are key examples..."
Further formatted disambiguation follows. The AI lists the sources of its numbers at the end. Argue with it, not me.
None of Grok's generous response sounded especially anti-woke to me, but YMMV. I was just glad MechaHitler didn't show up.
The issue isn't "woke", the issue is "What constitutes an implicit subsidy?" And "Is an implicit subsidy really a subsidy?" And "How is the implicit subsidy calculated?" Fundamentally, this comes down to identifying a "social cost of carbon", which is a subject of some controversy.
You're free to redefine 'subsidy' however you like, but both ChatGPT and Grok give the same answer to your question that I would give from my own knowledge, so I'll let you argue with them. You can argue with them about the social cost of carbon, too. Meanwhile, Prof. Dessler is the default actual expert here, and none of us need to persuade you he's right.
If I were going to argue from authority, I certainly wouldn't use ChatGPT or Grok as my authority. ChatGPT was famously trained on the entire internet, which means it sucks up all the garbage as well as all the truth. Many people have a tendency to expand the use of words in order to score cheap rhetorical points without having to form coherent arguments. It looks like ChatGPT and Grok have keyed on that trend. If you google the word "subsidy", you'll likely find many different definitions, although none of the first five it listed for me included "externalities" as a subsidy. Although the Wikipedia entry hilariously includes a separate section on fossil fuel subsidies, and lists externalities as the main subsidy
As far as Prof. Dessler, I acknowledge his expertise on climate science. I will point out that his evaluation of the consequences of warming go much farther than consensus science as presented by the IPCC in its various assessments. On economics, though, he is no more an expert than you or I. Maybe less than I, because I graduated Summa Cum Laude in Economics from one of the top Economics departments in the country. I don't claim expertise, but I can often identify some of the right questions to ask.
You are, of course, free to accept whatever authorities you choose. One of my favorite Substackers says "We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe."
"What are these 'ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels', and are any of them in the US?"
----
The petrostates have the biggest subsidies, of course.
The US leases federal land at below market rates, and allows accelerated depreciation of oil field assets. US state governments may not have or do not enforce laws protecting aquifers or the environment in general. There is no industry fund to cover the many oil companies that go bankrupt* without sealing their old wells.
*The State of Colorado went after one oil company for fraud when it split off an "orphan" company to own the least productive wells, so that it could go bankrupt and—oops—not be able to spend money sealing them. That split-corporation trick is used in a lot of industries, including home building companies that make money off of selling their houses but not hanging around long enough to be liable for any defects.
The US leases federal land for lots of purposes, including fossil fuel production. The leases are let through auction - it seems to me that means the market rate is set by the auction. How is the lease rate below market rate?
Calling other policies a subsidy because they don't cover some thing you think should be covered is a bit of a stretch. Should it be considered a subsidy if wind farm operators are not required to compensate local residents for unsightliness, unpleasant sounds, or flickering sunlight? You say there's a problem with oil companies going bankrupt to avoid paying shutdown costs - do you have any estimate for how big a problem this is? Could it be addressed by requiring oil companies to post a bond to cover cleanup costs?
"Which utilities have been contractually bound to pay more for coal than for cheaper RE?"
----
It's nothing exotic in the utility/business world: They're called "power purchase agreements." The capital expenditure negotiation for traditional power plants had to ensure a buyer for the power in order to protect the return on investment. Cheaper RE being available didn't matter if the utility still had to buy an established minimum amount of energy from an existing plant with which they'd contracted.
So - Power Purchase Agreements. Likely to be a component of any power plant construction. Are you saying there are any in the US? I'd be somewhat surprised, since there have been essentially no new coal power plants built in the US in the last 35 years. This site (https://www.dlapiperintelligence.com/corporateppa/countries/) mentions PPAs in the US only with respect to green energy.
As your RMI fact sheet notes, PPAs (or something that gives comparable security) are essential to getting the investment capital to build any long-lived generation asset - this was the point I was trying to make above. It seems to me that, if some alternative generation is genuinely cheaper, there should be a way to terminate the PPA with appropriate compensation to the generator. This is commonly referred to as "stranded assets." I'd be very surprised if any PPA, at least in the US, is completely committed to burning coal. If solar were to be cheaper, the generator could build a solar farm, shut down the coal plant, and sell the solar power under the terms of the PPA.
How would a PPA force a utility to pay more for coal than for cheaper RE?
"I'd be very surprised if any PPA, at least in the US, is completely committed to burning coal."
----
I just thought such contracts were attached to individual capital investments. Other investors would come in for other plant projects, independent of the power *buyer*.
AFAICT, there isn't a coherent relationship between power plant operators v. ISOs v. local utilities across the US (including spanning public vs. private operation), so contractual relationships should be all over the map.
A PPA contract can arrange with Buyer to purchase a certain minimum amount of power across a certain time range in exchange for other negotiated guarantees. It's possible there's no cost-effective way to terminate the contract, or nobody in the office knows how to handle it*, or the fat cats that run the power plant dominate the overworked utility operator, or one of the lawyers is an idiot.
___________________
*My realization at how seat-of-the-pants or clueless some seemingly clueful organizations can be came to me late in life. The person who Knows About That Stuff might have left years ago and it never came up until now.
Yeah, you have to be careful with things like that. At the risk of excessive nerdiness -
The Wikipedia data seems to have been written in 2009, and not updated since. I went to their data source (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/), and they have monthly reports on power plants - operating, planned, retired, etc. The site only has reports since 2015, so I couldn't get the 2008 data they claimed to use. As of June 2025, there are 16 Operating coal-fired units with Operating Dates between 2005 and 2009. In July 2015 (oldest report available on the EIA site), there were 18, although one was "Out of Service, not expected to return to service in next year". That unit was Lamar Plant (Colorado) Unit 6, which is now reported as Operating Date 2009, Retired Date 2014.
A little further research (https://www.powermag.com/lamar-repowering-projects-creative-melding-of-old-and-new-wins-marmaduke-award/) shows that this unit was a gas/oil fired unit built in 1972, then placed in long-term storage in 2003. Then, in 2005, due to a shortage of baseload capacity, the owner decided to reactivate the unit as part of a repowering project. I'm not a power plant guy, but it looks like the old Unit 6 turbine was to be powered by a new coal-fired boiler that would also be attached to a new turbine (Unit 8). It appears the unit may have produced some power, but was shut down at some point, with demolition completed in June 2021. (https://theprowersjournal.com/2021/06/lamar-repowering-project-ends-with-a-crash/) Unit 8 was not listed as Operating, Retired, Planned, or Cancelled in 2015, so it's possible it never produced an electron. Not my idea of a new coal-powered unit, but ymmv. But that was a small unit, and wouldn't have been very important if it had operated.
Let's take two that might be important: Cross (South Carolina) Units 3 Operating Date 2007) and 4 (Operating Date 2008), both 652 MW. Looks like these units are new-built coal-fired units added to the existing coal plant (Operating Dates 1984 and 1995). I'll give you at least a half point each for those.
Taking 2 more examples: H L Spurlock (Kentucky) Units 3 (Operating Date 2005) and 4 (Operating Date 2009), both 329.4 MW. Looks like these units are also new-built coal-fired units added to the existing coal plant (Operating Dates 1977 and 1981).
Archer Daniels Midland Clinton (Iowa) Units 1A and 2A (Operating Date 2009). These 2 units replaced 5 earlier coal-fired units on the same site, Operating Dates 1940-1991. (https://www.gem.wiki/Archer_Daniels_Midland_Clinton_Power_Plant) The units seem to have new boilers and turbines, and was also designed to include up to 20% biomass as a fuel.
So, there's more new coal activity than I expected, but all of what I've looked at involved new units at existing coal-fired facilities.
Do you not know that fossil fuel subsidies are mostly a fabrication, outside of Russia and other non-US, non-EU areas? Fake trillion dollars numbers come from adding the made-up social cost of carbon at an arbitrary level, tax incentives for capital costs (which apply to numerous industries) and the like. Subsidies for fossil fuels are many times higher.
The Social Cost of Carbon calculations invariably make up negatives while totally ignoring the clear positives of more CO2.
I think it's the externalities that dominate, like the oil spills, the wars with/for petrostates (why is Saudi Arabia considered a US ally?), the extraction of 8+ billion tonnes of coal every year (single use), the unhealthy combustion byproducts of SOx, NOx and PM2.5, the asthma and lung cancer. Not making the people who profit from fossil fuels pay for these downsides →is← a form of subsidy.
Within the US, the oil and gas industry is given tax breaks and are leasing federal land on below-market rates (spending on politicians has a great return on investment).
Yes, ANIMAL WASTE IS PLANT FOOD. That doesn't compensate for the fact that most plants (especially crops we rely on) don't thrive in very hot, very dry or very wet conditions.
How about we put you into a room with all of the food and water you'll ever need, and set the wet bulb temperature to >95°F? Do you think that food and water will keep you alive?
So, you're referring to externalities. If you're referring specifically to SOx, NOx, and PM2.5, are you claiming that current US restrictions on such pollutants are insufficient? Based on what analysis?
If you're talking about carbon dioxide, I assume you're referring to some sort of "social cost of carbon." If so, what value are you assuming, and what is the basis for your calculation?
In the US, ground-level pollutants from power plants have been cleaned up for the most part, though the power plants didn't do anything until they were legally required to. My sister worked on a project to convert a Kentucky coal power plant from wet (slurry ponds) to dry waste output. It was *expensive*. So was the earlier requirement to add scrubbers.
PM2.5 is still a problem with diesel engines (trucks or generators), and there is clear evidence linking higher asthma rates for children living near ports and warehouses that get a lot of semi- truck traffic (Port of Long Beach notoriously bad).
If you want to see an example of politicians being deferential to fossil fuel companies, look up the craven US Representative who *apologized* to the BP guy because of all of the sh¡t they'd been given for their response to the 2010 months-long gulf oil spill.
Or note that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal unilaterally let an oil company free of its contractual obligation to re-close its erosion-accelerating access canal.
So, it was expensive to clean up pollution, and power plants didn't do it until they were required. Is this surprising? It seems to me the key point is that they were required, and they did clean up, and the problem is substantially solved.
If we're going to get into politicians offering favored treatment to favored interests, we'll be here a very long time.
Yes, it should be pointed out that disinformers rarely use wholesale energy prices, instead it is retail price across countries, which have differing taxes and fees.
"Next time someone says, “Germany installed a lot of wind and solar and it’s electricity prices skyrocketed,” you can let them know that was a consequence of increases in the price of natural gas."
That's right, but prices in Germany are one of the highest in Europe and have been steadily increasing. This rise is not attributable to renewable energy sources. While renewables were expected to reverse this trend, they have not done so because of the high taxes required to expand and build the necessary grid infrastructure to support them. This situation can be viewed critically or interpreted as a good investment. I tend for the latter.
Germany and others in the EU are likely reeling from the shutdown of Russian gas. The numbers would be drastically different if Germany had time to adapt to this situation. Sweden at one point was up to $.85 a kilowatt hour. Shock and Ahh.. shit
the price of electricity in most of these place is set by the price of natural gas. renewables are saving money, but as long as the market operates like it does, consumers won't capture much of the savings. while I agree that taxes are a key part of the problem of high costs, I don't see any evidence that it's caused by renewable infrastructure. if you have data, please let me know what it is.
the thing about transmission lines is that they last a very long time (e.g., 50-100 years). so 650 billion Euros is actually ~10 billion Euros per year. if that's all for renewable energy (which seems unlikely), then it still seems reasonable given all of the benefits of switching to climate-safe energy.
Well, yes, one can take that perspective. But I'm afraid that the taxpayers that must pay three times as much *now* are less focused on how much taxes people will have to pay in 100 years. 😅
It's one of the sad aspects of climate change that transmission has become markedly more expensive just to increase resilience. High voltage transmission towers, like those that were taken down by the derecho that went through Houston in 2024, now have to be built to withstand 80mph winds instead of 60mph. In California, the problem of wildfires being started by transmission lines has lead to increased cost to re-design the grid to have more local subnets for when power has to be turned off on high risk days.
We also need more transmission lines ("electron highways"):
(1) to model the "copper plate" needed to shift power back and forth along the grid of the future
(2) to handle the rapidly increasing user load
As demand for transmission line materials (cables and stanchions) and labor increases, the price will go up (or at least that's what economists tell me).
Ideally (🙄), when infrastructure is first designed and built, the design and budget should include a maintenance cycle. For example, the Golden Gate bridge has a continuous 2 year cycle of inspection and repainting. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway has a 5 year cycle to inspect and repair the double span 24-mile bridge. (That doesn't often happen with companies driven by quarterly reports to investors.) We'll be paying for a lot of the deferred maintenance.
Sorry to say that but your analysis for the European/German energy prices lacks substance.
Yes, renewable are much cheaper than gas. But gas is only needed because of renewables. Because the gas power plants are 'onlyneed' for times when the renewables do not provide enough energy.
Before Germany turned to renewables it had almost no gas power plants. Since Germany tries to phase out nuclear power (already accomplished) and coal power plant it has build a lot of gas power plants and it needs to build a lot more. The last administration calculated with investments costs of roughly 200 billion Euros for the gas power plants over the next 10 years).
The cost for building an running the gas power plants are high which drives the energy prices up steeply. Since there would not be a need for these expensive gas power plants without replacing nuclear power (was 20% of the german energy mix) with renewables and gas, the usage of renewables renewables are indirectly 100% responsible for increasing energy prices in Germany.
Also, because of the renewables the electricity network needs to modified because renewables need a different kind of network since renewable energy can't be produced in same location where nuclear power plants of coal power plants are located.
This investment is believed between 200 and 300 billions euros. It does not show up in the energy prices directly since the government is spending it.
And third, too much solar over in the middle of the day forced for the government to spent 15 billion Euro last year (2024). Theses costs are solely down to solar. All the small solar power plant are not controllable since Germany has no smart grid.
Great post – thanks for sharing these insights! A couple of points that might help complete the picture, especially regarding electricity prices:
1. Europe operates a unified electricity market, which means wholesale electricity prices are strongly influenced by supply and demand across borders. Even countries with low renewable generation can benefit from cheaper electricity imports when neighboring countries experience high solar or wind output. So while national generation portfolios vary widely, the price effect of renewables is often shared regionally, not just locally.
2. Norway is a special case. In figures like Fig. 1/2, it appears to have a low share of renewables, but in reality, over 98% is fossil free, mainly hydro. Norway often imports cheap re electricity from other countries to refill its pumped hydro reservoirs, which it later uses or re-exports during peak price periods. So Norway acts more like a giant green battery for Europe – and benefits economically from fluctuations in regional electricity prices, even when not producing wind or solar power itself.
You pointed it out very well: the increase in electricity price in Europe is due to network costs and taxes. But a part of these taxes is due to the prior subsidies that were given at high levels for renewables in the 2010s. So I would say: renewables lower the market price but can increase the retail price if the CfD strike price is high, which was the case in the past, but not anymore in most countries.
Natural gas (aka "fossil gas") is getting more expensive in the US in part because it's more profitable to turn it into LNG and ship it to Europe, where it commands a much higher price.
Peter Sinclair has summarized why PV/solar/storage is cheaper in the US:
And in defense of this thesis, I know that my own utility has been jacking up rates to cover their lost revenue from alternative energy being installed in their domain. Sometimes these increases are in the form of a direct price per kilowatt hour, but more often they’re snuck in as administrative, transportation, or service costs. I know that giant #DATA farms in the area along the Columbia River are paying 5 cents/kilowatt hour whereas I’m sometimes paying $.35/kwh. How is it that this John Come Lately and his DATA pigs are catching an unheard of low energy price and I pay 7x that amount.?
I don't know if this applies to your example, but in TX many big consumers (e.g., data centers, bitcoin mining) sign direct (bilateral) agreements with generators to get power at a much lower cost than retail consumers, thereby avoiding the wholesale market. e.g., I know a bitcoin miner that signed a long-term deal at 2.5 cents/kWh, much cheaper than the average wholesale price.
Would you happen to know the terms of a contract like that, particularly if it requires them to shut off if wholesale prices reach a certain point? Also, great post, thanks!
So how do you account for the very high energy costs in the UK and Germany? And California? LCOE is not a good measure of true energy costs. Unreliables are expensive.
the price of electricity in these place is set by the price of natural gas. so prices are high b/c natural gas is expensive. in CA, prices also include costs of transmission (to reduce fire risk) and social programs. for the UK, see this: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electricity-pricing
Wind and solar are the cheapest sources, also in Germany. But the merit-order principle and the costs for the development of the grid inflate the final electricity price.
Missing from that very first graph appears to be New Zealand. Our electricity price is probably on par with US cents per kwh, and we're at 85% or more renewable... that would just about put us down in the "No Cheap Renewable" portion of that deluded lying graph.
I appreciate your attempts to link energy prices to renewables. However, prices are often misleading or incomplete as indicators of total cost. There have been significant periods when European wholesale prices have been negative - when generators paid someone to use their electricity. Julien Jomaux has written about this extensively (most recently https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/what-has-been-the-impact-of-solar). This certainly doesn't mean that consumers are seeing negative prices - it reflects the fact that public policy requires utilities to buy all available "green" power; for hours with more green power than total demand, this leads to grid operators paying other generators to go off line. Julien Jomaux has also documented this topic, but focuses mainly on the impact on business cases for investors. The cost of operating the grid also includes "ancillary services" of several types, including load balancing; systems with a lot of renewable generation require more of these ancillary services - Julien Jomaux has written extensively about this as well.
About 75% of German electric bills comes from levies, charges, and taxes (https://www.germanledtech.de/en/news/electricity-bill-simply-explained/). These are all charged as cents per kWh, which explains why German retail electric prices are so high. These charges include fees of about 7.5 cents per kWh explicitly for green energy.
Portugal has about the same renewables percent as Germany and much lower retail prices. In Portugal, the only parts of the bill that vary with consumption are the generating charge and VAT (https://www.realestate-algarve.info/posts/electricity/). Other fees and charges are fixed amounts per customer; I can't tell from my ten minutes' research whether these fixed prices include any green energy charges, but the point is that they don't go into the cost per kWh, which goes a long way toward explaining why Portugal's retail prices are lower than Germany's.
I respect your abilities and credentials as a climate scientist. But it might be better to leave explorations of the cost of energy to people more familiar with electricity markets and pricing, or at least to people willing to spend some effort researching the topic.
"it might be better to leave explorations of the cost of energy to people more familiar with electricity markets and pricing"
LOL, no. An alternative is for you to unsubscribe and not read our substack. But, of course, that will never happen. You love being outraged by my analysis.
Outraged? Not at all. I enjoy seeing a variety of perspectives, including from people I disagree with. That's how I learn, and how I sharpen my own arguments. When I present an argument, my objective is to be respectful of those who disagree, perhaps get them to reconsider some aspect of their own position, and to provide material that can be a useful basis for others' investigations. For people who agree with me, I hope to provide material that will give them better understanding.
I don't intend to unsubscribe. If you find my remarks offensive, you are under no obligation to respond, but I would genuinely appreciate any substantive responses you make - I might learn something from them.
He' OK. He's just another nerd with some outside expertise.
Anyway, he's never once compared your posts to a load of fetid dingo's kidneys, which you should be prepared for from the likes of fervent climate denialists.
An old Usenet axiom:
"The best way to get information out of Usenet is not to post a question, but the wrong information."
Likewise, the commentariat often provides more information (from experts crawling out of the woodwork) than the original post.
"This certainly doesn't mean that consumers are seeing negative prices - it reflects the fact that public policy requires utilities to buy all available "green" power; for hours with more green power than total demand, this leads to grid operators paying other generators to go off line. "
----
Policy wonks have discovered that subsidies are needed to goose the transition to RE, especially considering both the ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels and the extensive activity on behalf of FF industries to undermine and demonize wind and solar at the local level.
Conversely, some utilities have been →contractually bound← to pay more for coal power than cheaper RE. At the source, solar/wind/storage is typically much cheaper than fossil thermal when it's available, but there are a lot of long term contracts, politics, taxes and other overhead to obscure the signal.
And don't forget that there are enormous subsidies on fossil fuels from externalities (e.g., climate impacts, air pollution, geopolitical insecurity).
If you're referring to externalities, I assume you're thinking of some "social cost of carbon." Do you have a figure in mind? If not, how would you balance the external costs against the benefits from using fossil fuels?
here is a consensus estimate of the social cost of carbon:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9
$185/ton, or about 7 cents per kWh
Like fewer deaths from cold, increased crop production, and increased availability of land in cold places?
Climate change is hurting crop yields due to too much or too little rain, higher temps (especially at night) and stalled weather in general. One good crop year for American farmers (2022) had them optimistic about selling into the shortages elsewhere on the planet...except that the Mississippi River was running so low that the barges had to run lighter to keep from grounding, raising the cost.
Is there anywhere where crop yields are improving *because* of climate change?
I suppose people using greenhouses for many decades are completely delusional! Higher levels of CO2 benefits many crops. Some crops do better with higher temperatures. Some may not but farmers can (and do) move the locations where they grow.
"I suppose people using greenhouses for many decades are completely delusional! Higher levels of CO2 benefits many crops."
----
When plants are crowded into an enclosed structure, they're all "breathing" from the same limited volume of air. They absorb CO2 (and a little O2) but beyond a certain level, too high a buildup of their waste oxygen is bad for them. Of course people maintaining full commercial greenhouses find better results when they pump in more CO2 for them. Duh.
In the same way, pack a bunch of mammals in an enclosed space, and they do better with extra oxygen. Not only that, but high levels of CO2 are toxic. This is why CO2 "scrubbers" are critical on submarines and space stations. The "choking" sensation when people are suffocating is not from lack of oxygen but excess CO2 (which is why people can calmly suffocate in a room full of nitrogen or helium).
Let's stipulate that higher temperatures are having some negative effect on crop yields. The 2019 IPCC Special Report identified some estimated effects, which seem fairly small - on the order of 5% globally for some crops, before allowing for better tillage, better seeds, better irrigation, better fertilizers, and more mechanization. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/#:~:text=distribution%2C%20and%20exchange.-,5.2.2.1,Impacts%20on%20crop%20production,-Observed%20impacts.%20
If you advocate complete decarbonization, you should recognize that this would mean much less mechanization, much less fertilizers, and less irrigation in many areas. It seems that the advocated cure would be much worse than the disease. Or are you advocating something else?
I was responding to the comment that was reminiscent of the old "CO2 is plant fuel" denialist refrain, where that was given in response to the warnings about global warming.
I have no delusion that humans will come anywhere near a responsible handling of reducing greenhouse gas *emissions*, much less pulling meaningful amounts CO2 out of the atmosphere. "Complete decarbonization" is impossible, because humans are stupidly, tribally political creatures.
The best I can advocate is "stop digging". For example, the ethanol corn subsidy is an *abomination* under the pretense that it is somehow green when it's really just political pork, but I don't know how to stop it. Cutting and burning the Amazon to grow cattle is not going to stop. Private jets produce upwards of 5 times as much CO2/passenger than commercial jets (which is bad enough), but the people who can afford to fly private won't ever stop. Coastal cities are going to make futile efforts (at great expense) to hold back the sea instead of acknowledging reality that property values and associated property tax revenues will spiral down (nobody is in greater functional denial than coastal city realtors).
...and the US spending $80B a year to guard the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.
What are these "ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels", and are any of them in the US?
Which utilities have been contractually bound to pay more for coal than for cheaper RE? When were these contracts set up, by whom, and why? Can you give me a few examples?
When you say solar/wind/storage is much cheaper than fossil thermal, are you referring to marginal cost? If so, I completely agree. The problem with looking only at marginal cost is that people who are paid only marginal cost never make any money to pay for their capital investment, so they will never make the investment. The rules which govern the grid certainly have some perverse incentives, rent seeking, and legacy costs and contracts distorting the market. Regulators are supposed to set the rules to protect the public, but of course they are more likely to be sympathetic to industry participants (whom they know and have long relationships with) than with consumers.
I thought I'd give Grok a try with Brian's decarbonization-alarmist memes, since Grok is supposed to be purged of 'wokeness'. I entered the following single sentence at https://grok.com/chat.
"What are these "ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels", and are any of them in the US?"
Grok supplied a nicely formatted, concise bullet list of types of subsidies for fossil fuels (https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw%3D%3D_301bee9c-1f1b-499f-b5e3-5822bcce44f6). I'll just quote a key paragraph:
"Yes, the United States provides ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels, both explicit and implicit. In 2022, total U.S. fossil fuel subsidies were estimated at $757 billion, with $3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in implicit subsidies (e.g., unpriced health and environmental costs). Below are key examples..."
Further formatted disambiguation follows. The AI lists the sources of its numbers at the end. Argue with it, not me.
None of Grok's generous response sounded especially anti-woke to me, but YMMV. I was just glad MechaHitler didn't show up.
The issue isn't "woke", the issue is "What constitutes an implicit subsidy?" And "Is an implicit subsidy really a subsidy?" And "How is the implicit subsidy calculated?" Fundamentally, this comes down to identifying a "social cost of carbon", which is a subject of some controversy.
You're free to redefine 'subsidy' however you like, but both ChatGPT and Grok give the same answer to your question that I would give from my own knowledge, so I'll let you argue with them. You can argue with them about the social cost of carbon, too. Meanwhile, Prof. Dessler is the default actual expert here, and none of us need to persuade you he's right.
If I were going to argue from authority, I certainly wouldn't use ChatGPT or Grok as my authority. ChatGPT was famously trained on the entire internet, which means it sucks up all the garbage as well as all the truth. Many people have a tendency to expand the use of words in order to score cheap rhetorical points without having to form coherent arguments. It looks like ChatGPT and Grok have keyed on that trend. If you google the word "subsidy", you'll likely find many different definitions, although none of the first five it listed for me included "externalities" as a subsidy. Although the Wikipedia entry hilariously includes a separate section on fossil fuel subsidies, and lists externalities as the main subsidy
As far as Prof. Dessler, I acknowledge his expertise on climate science. I will point out that his evaluation of the consequences of warming go much farther than consensus science as presented by the IPCC in its various assessments. On economics, though, he is no more an expert than you or I. Maybe less than I, because I graduated Summa Cum Laude in Economics from one of the top Economics departments in the country. I don't claim expertise, but I can often identify some of the right questions to ask.
You are, of course, free to accept whatever authorities you choose. One of my favorite Substackers says "We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe."
"What are these 'ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels', and are any of them in the US?"
----
The petrostates have the biggest subsidies, of course.
The US leases federal land at below market rates, and allows accelerated depreciation of oil field assets. US state governments may not have or do not enforce laws protecting aquifers or the environment in general. There is no industry fund to cover the many oil companies that go bankrupt* without sealing their old wells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies#Subsidies_by_country
______________
*The State of Colorado went after one oil company for fraud when it split off an "orphan" company to own the least productive wells, so that it could go bankrupt and—oops—not be able to spend money sealing them. That split-corporation trick is used in a lot of industries, including home building companies that make money off of selling their houses but not hanging around long enough to be liable for any defects.
The US leases federal land for lots of purposes, including fossil fuel production. The leases are let through auction - it seems to me that means the market rate is set by the auction. How is the lease rate below market rate?
Calling other policies a subsidy because they don't cover some thing you think should be covered is a bit of a stretch. Should it be considered a subsidy if wind farm operators are not required to compensate local residents for unsightliness, unpleasant sounds, or flickering sunlight? You say there's a problem with oil companies going bankrupt to avoid paying shutdown costs - do you have any estimate for how big a problem this is? Could it be addressed by requiring oil companies to post a bond to cover cleanup costs?
"Which utilities have been contractually bound to pay more for coal than for cheaper RE?"
----
It's nothing exotic in the utility/business world: They're called "power purchase agreements." The capital expenditure negotiation for traditional power plants had to ensure a buyer for the power in order to protect the return on investment. Cheaper RE being available didn't matter if the utility still had to buy an established minimum amount of energy from an existing plant with which they'd contracted.
https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/06/rmi_unlocking_coal_contracts_explainer_brief.pdf
So - Power Purchase Agreements. Likely to be a component of any power plant construction. Are you saying there are any in the US? I'd be somewhat surprised, since there have been essentially no new coal power plants built in the US in the last 35 years. This site (https://www.dlapiperintelligence.com/corporateppa/countries/) mentions PPAs in the US only with respect to green energy.
As your RMI fact sheet notes, PPAs (or something that gives comparable security) are essential to getting the investment capital to build any long-lived generation asset - this was the point I was trying to make above. It seems to me that, if some alternative generation is genuinely cheaper, there should be a way to terminate the PPA with appropriate compensation to the generator. This is commonly referred to as "stranded assets." I'd be very surprised if any PPA, at least in the US, is completely committed to burning coal. If solar were to be cheaper, the generator could build a solar farm, shut down the coal plant, and sell the solar power under the terms of the PPA.
How would a PPA force a utility to pay more for coal than for cheaper RE?
"I'd be very surprised if any PPA, at least in the US, is completely committed to burning coal."
----
I just thought such contracts were attached to individual capital investments. Other investors would come in for other plant projects, independent of the power *buyer*.
AFAICT, there isn't a coherent relationship between power plant operators v. ISOs v. local utilities across the US (including spanning public vs. private operation), so contractual relationships should be all over the map.
A PPA contract can arrange with Buyer to purchase a certain minimum amount of power across a certain time range in exchange for other negotiated guarantees. It's possible there's no cost-effective way to terminate the contract, or nobody in the office knows how to handle it*, or the fat cats that run the power plant dominate the overworked utility operator, or one of the lawyers is an idiot.
___________________
*My realization at how seat-of-the-pants or clueless some seemingly clueful organizations can be came to me late in life. The person who Knows About That Stuff might have left years ago and it never came up until now.
"I'd be somewhat surprised, since there have been essentially no new coal power plants built in the US in the last 35 years. "
----
This shows 21→generating units← built in the US 2005-2009, but the 932MW Sandy Creek plant came online in 2013.
https://www.gem.wiki/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants#Age_comparison_of_coal_plants
I don't know how long capex agreements can be.
Yeah, you have to be careful with things like that. At the risk of excessive nerdiness -
The Wikipedia data seems to have been written in 2009, and not updated since. I went to their data source (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/), and they have monthly reports on power plants - operating, planned, retired, etc. The site only has reports since 2015, so I couldn't get the 2008 data they claimed to use. As of June 2025, there are 16 Operating coal-fired units with Operating Dates between 2005 and 2009. In July 2015 (oldest report available on the EIA site), there were 18, although one was "Out of Service, not expected to return to service in next year". That unit was Lamar Plant (Colorado) Unit 6, which is now reported as Operating Date 2009, Retired Date 2014.
A little further research (https://www.powermag.com/lamar-repowering-projects-creative-melding-of-old-and-new-wins-marmaduke-award/) shows that this unit was a gas/oil fired unit built in 1972, then placed in long-term storage in 2003. Then, in 2005, due to a shortage of baseload capacity, the owner decided to reactivate the unit as part of a repowering project. I'm not a power plant guy, but it looks like the old Unit 6 turbine was to be powered by a new coal-fired boiler that would also be attached to a new turbine (Unit 8). It appears the unit may have produced some power, but was shut down at some point, with demolition completed in June 2021. (https://theprowersjournal.com/2021/06/lamar-repowering-project-ends-with-a-crash/) Unit 8 was not listed as Operating, Retired, Planned, or Cancelled in 2015, so it's possible it never produced an electron. Not my idea of a new coal-powered unit, but ymmv. But that was a small unit, and wouldn't have been very important if it had operated.
Let's take two that might be important: Cross (South Carolina) Units 3 Operating Date 2007) and 4 (Operating Date 2008), both 652 MW. Looks like these units are new-built coal-fired units added to the existing coal plant (Operating Dates 1984 and 1995). I'll give you at least a half point each for those.
Taking 2 more examples: H L Spurlock (Kentucky) Units 3 (Operating Date 2005) and 4 (Operating Date 2009), both 329.4 MW. Looks like these units are also new-built coal-fired units added to the existing coal plant (Operating Dates 1977 and 1981).
Archer Daniels Midland Clinton (Iowa) Units 1A and 2A (Operating Date 2009). These 2 units replaced 5 earlier coal-fired units on the same site, Operating Dates 1940-1991. (https://www.gem.wiki/Archer_Daniels_Midland_Clinton_Power_Plant) The units seem to have new boilers and turbines, and was also designed to include up to 20% biomass as a fuel.
So, there's more new coal activity than I expected, but all of what I've looked at involved new units at existing coal-fired facilities.
Do you not know that fossil fuel subsidies are mostly a fabrication, outside of Russia and other non-US, non-EU areas? Fake trillion dollars numbers come from adding the made-up social cost of carbon at an arbitrary level, tax incentives for capital costs (which apply to numerous industries) and the like. Subsidies for fossil fuels are many times higher.
The Social Cost of Carbon calculations invariably make up negatives while totally ignoring the clear positives of more CO2.
I think it's the externalities that dominate, like the oil spills, the wars with/for petrostates (why is Saudi Arabia considered a US ally?), the extraction of 8+ billion tonnes of coal every year (single use), the unhealthy combustion byproducts of SOx, NOx and PM2.5, the asthma and lung cancer. Not making the people who profit from fossil fuels pay for these downsides →is← a form of subsidy.
Within the US, the oil and gas industry is given tax breaks and are leasing federal land on below-market rates (spending on politicians has a great return on investment).
Yes, ANIMAL WASTE IS PLANT FOOD. That doesn't compensate for the fact that most plants (especially crops we rely on) don't thrive in very hot, very dry or very wet conditions.
How about we put you into a room with all of the food and water you'll ever need, and set the wet bulb temperature to >95°F? Do you think that food and water will keep you alive?
So, you're referring to externalities. If you're referring specifically to SOx, NOx, and PM2.5, are you claiming that current US restrictions on such pollutants are insufficient? Based on what analysis?
If you're talking about carbon dioxide, I assume you're referring to some sort of "social cost of carbon." If so, what value are you assuming, and what is the basis for your calculation?
In the US, ground-level pollutants from power plants have been cleaned up for the most part, though the power plants didn't do anything until they were legally required to. My sister worked on a project to convert a Kentucky coal power plant from wet (slurry ponds) to dry waste output. It was *expensive*. So was the earlier requirement to add scrubbers.
PM2.5 is still a problem with diesel engines (trucks or generators), and there is clear evidence linking higher asthma rates for children living near ports and warehouses that get a lot of semi- truck traffic (Port of Long Beach notoriously bad).
If you want to see an example of politicians being deferential to fossil fuel companies, look up the craven US Representative who *apologized* to the BP guy because of all of the sh¡t they'd been given for their response to the 2010 months-long gulf oil spill.
Or note that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal unilaterally let an oil company free of its contractual obligation to re-close its erosion-accelerating access canal.
So, it was expensive to clean up pollution, and power plants didn't do it until they were required. Is this surprising? It seems to me the key point is that they were required, and they did clean up, and the problem is substantially solved.
If we're going to get into politicians offering favored treatment to favored interests, we'll be here a very long time.
Yes, it should be pointed out that disinformers rarely use wholesale energy prices, instead it is retail price across countries, which have differing taxes and fees.
"Next time someone says, “Germany installed a lot of wind and solar and it’s electricity prices skyrocketed,” you can let them know that was a consequence of increases in the price of natural gas."
That's right, but prices in Germany are one of the highest in Europe and have been steadily increasing. This rise is not attributable to renewable energy sources. While renewables were expected to reverse this trend, they have not done so because of the high taxes required to expand and build the necessary grid infrastructure to support them. This situation can be viewed critically or interpreted as a good investment. I tend for the latter.
Germany and others in the EU are likely reeling from the shutdown of Russian gas. The numbers would be drastically different if Germany had time to adapt to this situation. Sweden at one point was up to $.85 a kilowatt hour. Shock and Ahh.. shit
Yes, in Germany gas prices almost doubled. But electricity prices went back to almost the same price of 2022.
the price of electricity in most of these place is set by the price of natural gas. renewables are saving money, but as long as the market operates like it does, consumers won't capture much of the savings. while I agree that taxes are a key part of the problem of high costs, I don't see any evidence that it's caused by renewable infrastructure. if you have data, please let me know what it is.
It will cost about 650 billion € until 2045. One can't massively build wind and solar and simply connect it to the old grid as it was.
https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Dossier/grids-grid-expansion.html
https://www.vwl.uni-mannheim.de/media/Lehrstuehle/vwl/Krebs/Mannheim_01_Investitionsbedarfe.pdf
the thing about transmission lines is that they last a very long time (e.g., 50-100 years). so 650 billion Euros is actually ~10 billion Euros per year. if that's all for renewable energy (which seems unlikely), then it still seems reasonable given all of the benefits of switching to climate-safe energy.
Well, yes, one can take that perspective. But I'm afraid that the taxpayers that must pay three times as much *now* are less focused on how much taxes people will have to pay in 100 years. 😅
It's one of the sad aspects of climate change that transmission has become markedly more expensive just to increase resilience. High voltage transmission towers, like those that were taken down by the derecho that went through Houston in 2024, now have to be built to withstand 80mph winds instead of 60mph. In California, the problem of wildfires being started by transmission lines has lead to increased cost to re-design the grid to have more local subnets for when power has to be turned off on high risk days.
We also need more transmission lines ("electron highways"):
(1) to model the "copper plate" needed to shift power back and forth along the grid of the future
(2) to handle the rapidly increasing user load
As demand for transmission line materials (cables and stanchions) and labor increases, the price will go up (or at least that's what economists tell me).
Ideally (🙄), when infrastructure is first designed and built, the design and budget should include a maintenance cycle. For example, the Golden Gate bridge has a continuous 2 year cycle of inspection and repainting. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway has a 5 year cycle to inspect and repair the double span 24-mile bridge. (That doesn't often happen with companies driven by quarterly reports to investors.) We'll be paying for a lot of the deferred maintenance.
Germany's buying expensive LNG to replace the loss of Putin's gas.
Sorry to say that but your analysis for the European/German energy prices lacks substance.
Yes, renewable are much cheaper than gas. But gas is only needed because of renewables. Because the gas power plants are 'onlyneed' for times when the renewables do not provide enough energy.
Before Germany turned to renewables it had almost no gas power plants. Since Germany tries to phase out nuclear power (already accomplished) and coal power plant it has build a lot of gas power plants and it needs to build a lot more. The last administration calculated with investments costs of roughly 200 billion Euros for the gas power plants over the next 10 years).
The cost for building an running the gas power plants are high which drives the energy prices up steeply. Since there would not be a need for these expensive gas power plants without replacing nuclear power (was 20% of the german energy mix) with renewables and gas, the usage of renewables renewables are indirectly 100% responsible for increasing energy prices in Germany.
Also, because of the renewables the electricity network needs to modified because renewables need a different kind of network since renewable energy can't be produced in same location where nuclear power plants of coal power plants are located.
This investment is believed between 200 and 300 billions euros. It does not show up in the energy prices directly since the government is spending it.
And third, too much solar over in the middle of the day forced for the government to spent 15 billion Euro last year (2024). Theses costs are solely down to solar. All the small solar power plant are not controllable since Germany has no smart grid.
Great post – thanks for sharing these insights! A couple of points that might help complete the picture, especially regarding electricity prices:
1. Europe operates a unified electricity market, which means wholesale electricity prices are strongly influenced by supply and demand across borders. Even countries with low renewable generation can benefit from cheaper electricity imports when neighboring countries experience high solar or wind output. So while national generation portfolios vary widely, the price effect of renewables is often shared regionally, not just locally.
2. Norway is a special case. In figures like Fig. 1/2, it appears to have a low share of renewables, but in reality, over 98% is fossil free, mainly hydro. Norway often imports cheap re electricity from other countries to refill its pumped hydro reservoirs, which it later uses or re-exports during peak price periods. So Norway acts more like a giant green battery for Europe – and benefits economically from fluctuations in regional electricity prices, even when not producing wind or solar power itself.
Thanks for the clarification!
You pointed it out very well: the increase in electricity price in Europe is due to network costs and taxes. But a part of these taxes is due to the prior subsidies that were given at high levels for renewables in the 2010s. So I would say: renewables lower the market price but can increase the retail price if the CfD strike price is high, which was the case in the past, but not anymore in most countries.
Natural gas (aka "fossil gas") is getting more expensive in the US in part because it's more profitable to turn it into LNG and ship it to Europe, where it commands a much higher price.
Peter Sinclair has summarized why PV/solar/storage is cheaper in the US:
Energy Executives on Building New Generation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHfwTFEKgg0
Absolutely! The natural gas market has become international, so we now pay the global price and it's going to be bad news for the U.S. consumers.
And in defense of this thesis, I know that my own utility has been jacking up rates to cover their lost revenue from alternative energy being installed in their domain. Sometimes these increases are in the form of a direct price per kilowatt hour, but more often they’re snuck in as administrative, transportation, or service costs. I know that giant #DATA farms in the area along the Columbia River are paying 5 cents/kilowatt hour whereas I’m sometimes paying $.35/kwh. How is it that this John Come Lately and his DATA pigs are catching an unheard of low energy price and I pay 7x that amount.?
I don't know if this applies to your example, but in TX many big consumers (e.g., data centers, bitcoin mining) sign direct (bilateral) agreements with generators to get power at a much lower cost than retail consumers, thereby avoiding the wholesale market. e.g., I know a bitcoin miner that signed a long-term deal at 2.5 cents/kWh, much cheaper than the average wholesale price.
Would you happen to know the terms of a contract like that, particularly if it requires them to shut off if wholesale prices reach a certain point? Also, great post, thanks!
So how do you account for the very high energy costs in the UK and Germany? And California? LCOE is not a good measure of true energy costs. Unreliables are expensive.
the price of electricity in these place is set by the price of natural gas. so prices are high b/c natural gas is expensive. in CA, prices also include costs of transmission (to reduce fire risk) and social programs. for the UK, see this: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electricity-pricing
as I've documented here, renewables save money.
Wind and solar are the cheapest sources, also in Germany. But the merit-order principle and the costs for the development of the grid inflate the final electricity price.