Global evidence is clear: Adding more solar and wind to the energy supply pushes up the price of electricity. Ontario families and businesses already know this — from bitter experience. Beginning in 2005, Ontario began phasing out coal and dove headlong into subsidizing wind and solar generation.

That green shift led to a sharp rise in electricity prices. From 2005 to 2020 the average, inflation-adjusted cost of electricity doubled, from 7.7 cents to 15.3 cents. Since 2019 the government has subsidized these high costs through a slew of programs like the “Renewable Cost Shift.” But ratepayers’ pain has been relieved by shifting it onto taxpayers. Today, this policy costs Ontario more than $6 billion annually, four times what it did in 2018.

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

Yet, with the backing of powerful green energy interests and credulous journalists, politicians keep gaslighting voters, claiming green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. Supposedly, the green transition even makes money.

But solar and wind are only cheap when the sun is shining and the wind blowing. At all other times, their cost is infinite: no matter how much you pay, you can’t get any. But modern societies need around-the-clock power. The intermittency of solar and wind means backup is required, often delivered by fossil fuels. Which means citizens end up paying for two power systems: both renewables and their backups. Moreover, much more transmission is needed to get wind and solar to users, while, being used less, backup fossil fuels have fewer hours to earn back their capital costs. Both effects increase costs even further.

Intermittency problems can be huge. In Yukon in May 2022 solar power delivered 150 times more electricity to the grid than it did seven months later. One study of China concluded that, including the cost of backup power, the real cost of solar is twice that of coal. A peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas concluded wind was 12 times and solar 38 times more expensive than fossil fuels. Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Denmark all increasingly rely on solar and wind power and, not surprisingly, have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.

The International Energy Agency’s latest data from nearly 70 countries reveal a clear correlation between use of solar and wind and higher average household and business energy prices. In countries using little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is about 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (in C$2024). For every 10 per cent increase in the share of solar and wind, electricity costs rise by nearly eight cents per kWh. These numbers are for 2022 but the results were essentially the same for 2019, before the impacts of COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war.