Consumers burn fossil fuels because it's cost-efficient and convenient — for now. Experts don’t consider fossil fuels renewable energy because their global supply is finite. Solar energy, however, is a truly renewable source of natural energy.
The sun won't stop providing sunlight any time soon, and it's available all over the world. However, the amount of sunlight we receive varies depending on location, time of day, season and weather conditions. For instance, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s ideal to have a south-facing roof. Even if this isn’t the case, though, solar can still work for you, especially if your roof doesn’t get lots of shade throughout the day.
As with all power sources,
solar energy has its pros and cons. The two main disadvantages of solar energy are its high upfront costs and its lower energy density. Lower energy density isn’t really a problem, though — it just means more solar panels are necessary for a given energy output. Solar energy output is set by the physics of the panel, because only some frequencies of light hitting the panel can be converted to electrical energy.
Overall, the health, environmental and economic costs of fossil fuels outweigh their value, even if they seem more affordable than solar energy options.
Solar energy cost vs. fossil fuels
Going solar is a money-saver in the long term, even though startup costs are higher for the consumer. Electricity from fossil fuels costs between 5 and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar energy costs average between 3 cents and 6 cents per kilowatt-hour and are trending down, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
In 2020, the initial installation and setup of a solar energy system in the U.S. cost an average of about $15,000 after state incentives. Luckily, the cost for solar panels has decreased more than 20% in the last five years and is expected to continue declining, according to
EnergySage.
Once installed, a solar energy system is easy to maintain and low in cost. Homeowners might even be able to make money by selling excess energy from their solar panels to their local grid.
Full solar panel systems can require a substantial upfront investment, though. Ultimately, solar panels can lower your utility bills, but not everyone is in the financial position to absorb the initial cost of panels until it balances out. To help offset the upfront cost of solar panel installation, many solar energy companies have leasing and
solar financing options available.
Solar Energy vs. Fossil Fuels | ConsumerAffairs
Many of us might assume that the reason so much energy still comes from gas and coal power plants is simple economics: those fuels are cheaper. But though it was once true, that assumption has actually been obliterated by a recent decline in solar and wind costs over the past decade.
When it comes to the cost of energy from new power plants, onshore wind and solar are now the cheapest sources—costing less than gas, geothermal, coal, or nuclear.
Solar, in particular, has cheapened at a blistering pace. Just 10 years ago, it was the most expensive option for building a new energy development. Since then, that cost has dropped by 90 percent, according to data from the
Levelized Cost of Energy Report and as
highlighted recently by Our World in Data. Utility-scale solar arrays are now the least costly option to build and operate. Wind power has also shown a dramatic decline—the lifetime costs of new wind farms dropped by 71 percent in the last decade.
...Despite a massive drop in costs, renewables haven’t replaced fossil fuels at the rate you might expect. That’s because the investments, policies, and very infrastructure of the energy industry as a whole are very much skewed in favor of fossil fuels.
While it is cheaper to build renewables when considering a new plant, that metric doesn’t necessarily apply to running a fossil fuel plant that already exists, explains Ashley Langer, an energy economist at the University of Arizona. Sometimes, she adds, the regulatory structure of utilities actually makes it more profitable to keep a coal or natural gas plant running.
Langer says this is especially true for the state-regulated monopolies that supply power in about half of US states. These investor-owned utilities are guaranteed a certain rate of return on their investments in power facilities, which basically guarantees continued earnings in exchange for running those plants. Even if the actual market costs of their energy sources would make operations costly, these monopolies are set up so that that’s not really a concern.
“The thing that’s really preventing us from rapidly transitioning is what we call the lock-in effect,” says Paul. “We have existing fossil plants where we’ve already paid to build them and the cost of producing one more unit of electricity is cheaper from using existing infrastructure than building new infrastructure in most cases. So given that we’ve already paid the upfront cost of this fossil fuel infrastructure, the economics don’t quite line up yet where we’re going to facilitate a rapid phase out of fossil fuel plants prior to the end of their life cycle.”
Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?
