Something I learned a while ago that stuck with me is that it takes roughly the same electricity to refine oil to gasoline as an EV uses to drive the distance that gasoline would get you, and that only accounts for refining, not transport and storage of that gasoline, loss due to evaporation, etc.
In other words, you can pretty much ignore where the electricity comes from and EVs are still better than gas cars for the environment.
EVs are generally more wasteful to produce but their efficiency covers the excess in 1-2 years of operations, and can operate without meaningful maintaining for 200-300k+ miles and 15-20 years. There are no obvious upsides to ICE beyond political ideology.
Right I'm not making an argument about EVs generally either way, just saying that the cost of the energy used to propel them on the road wasn't the controversy.
For a lot of us, the question isn't "new EV vs. new ICE"; it's "new EV vs. current gen ICE".
I think the cost of energy to propel them was a common push-back. I've heard "the grid is dirty so EVs are dirty" from many people, and my point is that the grid composition essentially cancels out with oil refining, at which point EVs are "free" (to operate) while ICE vehicles still have to burn the fuel.
As for carbon intensity in production, I'd be interested to see a clear apples-to-apples comparison. High end products tend to have more emissions associated with them because they take more time, materials, transport, they're lower volume, higher waste etc. EVs have historically been high-end cars, or at least upper-mid market and up, there have been very few cheap EVs until recently, so if you compare the average ICEV to the average BEV, I'd expect the ICEV to be a lower end car, and possibly lower emissions by default as a result. Batteries will drag up emissions, but I'm not sure I've seen truly fair numbers on this.
If anyone likes data visualization. Australia are betting heavily on renewables for their 2030 targets (despite some State Govt's opposition ahem Qld) and it's pretty magical see this in action day-to-day:
I'd also reccomend having a look at David Osmond's projections, where he looks at if we scaled up storage, wind and solar, by a few factors how close we would get to 100% stable and renewable.
This, and other documents are important, but will not prevent continuance both of the misleading claims, and opposition to wind, solar and EV. This is because the opposition is oftentimes not rooted in logic and reasoning but in emotions.
If you don't like something, being told it's good for you doesn't magically make you like it.
Preface to this is I generally do believe that renewables are cheaper, however I'm not entirely certain of how much because so rarely are full assumptions and details documented.
Storage costs, knock-on effect of intermittency, maintenance costs, etc.
Utility-scale solar is very unpopular in Japan. Because most suitable lands of them are densely forested, and installing utility-scale solar systems requires destory the forests.
There are concerns landslides due to reduced water storage functionality, and emotional antipathy at having their hometowns' mountains covered with solar panels.
(utility scale solar generators typically have a 35 year lifetime, so in areas of Japan where you’re not cutting down forests, it makes sense to build where depopulation is occurring in a “last person out shut off the light” sort of way before the rural community goes extinct)
By far, my priority for energy policy, in the US where I live, is to lower the cost of energy.
After reading Claim 11, starting on page 29, where the authors state that:
>unsubsidized solar energy is now generally cheaper than fossil fuels; and
> solar energy compares favorably in terms of levelized cost (total lifetime energy production / total lifetime cost)
The authors build this argument over three pages, including several charts, citing a Lazard paper that prices solar at $60/Mwh vs gas combined cycle at $70/MWh. But only in the last paragraph do they concede that when you include the cost of intermittency (firming), solar is only cheaper than gas peaking plant cost ($168/MWh).
As someone who lives in New York City and is drowning in inflated energy bills, lacking any engineering explanation why my residential electricity $/MWh is triple that of Beijing, I am sick and tired of phony academic papers such as this that begin with a conclusion and work backward to fabricate extremely misleading arguments.
I don’t care how my energy is generated. I strongly prefer it comes from sources that pollute less. But that preference is miles behind the priority for cheaper energy.
Bullshit research like this, written by attorneys, including arguments like claim 11 which tries to hide the fact that solar only produces energy during daylight, annd does not account for storage/firming costs are not helping move our national energy dialog forward.
I am not an academic, so I'll leave the formal stuff to others. However I have been running a residential dollar system for 2 years, and tracking the numbers, so here's my data for what it's worth.
Firstly, as a return on capital spent, I'm seeing a return of 16% per annum. As electricity prices increase, that trends up.
Secondly we're purchasing about 66% less energy annually. In summer months around 85% of daily (electrical) energy use is self-generated. Most of our annual grid consumption occurs during 2 months in winter. (We still produce then, but not enough to run our electric heating.)
Next year I'm switching to an EV, which can be charged from my current excess (unused) daytime generation for approx 9 months in the year.
I can't speak to grid-scale costs, but for me anyway, generation cost is 0. (Capital cost was real, but return on capital is 16% and rising, which is better than my retirement account.)
So, if you want to reduce your energy costs, self production is the best route. If you can't do that, then it's unlikely that you (as the consumer) will benefit much. The supplier will likely supply at market rates (set by the most expensive source) and the gap is their profit not yours.
We may in future move to a pricing model that favors cheap electricity during the day, and more expensive at night, but at least where I am that's not a thing yet.
So, generally speaking, it's a lot cheaper to use electric over gasoline for transport. Electric from solar is cheaper to produce than burning fossils. Whether that translates into cheaper for you though depends on market forces. If you're in the US, we'll, good luck with that. It seems to me that suppliers in the US price based on what the consumer will pay, and less on input cost.
Of course all my numbers will vary a lot based on location. YMMV.
>Bullshit research like this, written by attorneys, including arguments like claim 11 which tries to hide the fact that solar only produces energy during daylight, annd does not account for storage/firming costs are not helping move our national energy dialog forward.
Current cost: ~$140–$200 per MWh discharged (Latest Lazard LCOS reports). Price will get cut in half when sodium batteries production ramps up over next few years. Solar + Battery and Wind + battery is the cheapest form electricity outside of hydro.
> As someone who lives in New York City and is drowning in inflated energy bills, lacking any engineering explanation why my residential electricity $/MWh is triple that of Beijing, I am sick and tired of phony academic papers such as this that begin with a conclusion and work backward to fabricate extremely misleading arguments.
Majority of electricity cost is delivery not generation. In NYC, you have an aging electrical system that needed to be replaced 20 years ago. Then the billions spent to harden to system from global warming effects like Hurricane Sandy. Most of Coned electricity is natural gas and natural gas prices are up 50% compared to last year(August 2024 prices compared August 2025).
1. I am rooting for wind and solar generation but I am skeptical that sodium ion battery production could ramp from today’s pilots to the >100 TWh needed for grid-scale alone in less than 20 years. There is also the issue of transmission network buildout.
2. You’re right about generation vs delivery. I just checked and almost 2/3 of my $750 bill from last month was for delivery vs supply. Appreciate the reminder!
Energy costs in NYC are double the national average, and little of that has to do with energy production and a lot to do with living in a place with extreme energy demands and infrastructure needs. And of course taxes. If energy prices in NY are driving you to the brink, you'll get a nice discount by living literally anywhere else.
So you're saying we can't use solar because at some point, a small percentage of the time (i.e., peaking demand), it's more expensive than an alternative?
Did you miss that overall it's still cheaper?
There's nothing stopping us from using solar and nuclear as a baseline and firming/peaking with the cheapest fossil fuel. And given the cost reduction in batteries that's been going on, I doubt fossil fuel peaking will still be the cheapest in the next few years.
There are plenty of false claims about solar, wind and EV and they are worth debunking.
But there are also a few topics for which the real answer is much more nuanced (for instance claims #9, #12 and #13), where the claim itself is way exaggerated but there are still significant challenges to address, and treating those the same way you treat blatant bullshit is damageable, because of course opponents are going to exploit these to discredit the paper altogether…
I wish academics could be a little more level headed an avoid taking needlessly polarizing takes like that.
Read the beginning of false claim #28. This paper is such a joke lol. The authors agree with the "false statement" and then propose their own solution. I can't believe this is on an "edu" website.
If you read the claim they are addressing, it is specifically that
> Because of the wind’s intermittency and high variability, they do next to nothing to reduce the need for other fuels.
They then (correctly) point out that while wind on its own obviously doesn't work, it is still valuable as part of a grid system (with other sources of power).
Note that what they say (i.e. "as with solar energy, complete reliance on wind energy would pose intermittency challenges") is not agreeing with the statement, as the statement is that it does "next to nothing" and their argument is that it does a lot, when combined with other power sources.
Wind is extremely reliable. And it is relatively predictable, particularly on a short time scale. What it is is intermittent, which is a very different thing.
And by planning the locations well it's also less intermittent than one might expect, or you can build wind farms in locations with opposing wind trends so that you've always got something running.
How far away from each other are those opposing wind trends ? It’s one of the issues with the global grid in europe; if you look at weather patterns; all of western europe often tends to be contained in the same cell.
And assuming you can find those opposing wind trends not too distant from each other how reliable is that (anti)correlation.
As with solar energy, complete reliance on wind energy would pose intermittency challenges. However, wind, solar, and storage together can provide the majority of the country’s electricity without compromising reliability
The false claim they're rebutting is that because wind is unreliable, we shouldn't deploy wind turbines for clean energy generation. They stipulate that it is a great part of a package of renewables.
Yes, the actual claim they are debunking is the subheading: "Because of the wind’s intermittency and high variability, they do next to nothing to
reduce the need for other fuels."
Yes, but there’s no evidence that storage can or will be a cost effective strategy to let solar and wind handle base load power. That’s why China is betting on nuclear hard instead of storage to backfill what solar and wind cannot deliver.
Sure, but our grids have plenty of existing natural gas generation, hydro generation and storage, etc. These aren't going to disappear just because we're building wind and solar. If you can go from a grid that burns natural gas 100% of the time to only 20% of the time, you've still cut carbon emissions dramatically. In the mean time, storage technologies will improve, nuclear might become cheaper, transmission grids will become better and more interconnected, etc.
The fact that wind alone can't get us to a 100% renewable grid isn't a valid argument to not build wind power. Solar and wind are the cheapest and fastest technologies available today to expand energy production while reducing carbon emissions.
I wasn’t making that claim. I was just highlighting how renewables by themselves are insufficient for base load power. Renewables often help with peak load and that is valuable, but base load is storage+renewables, nuclear, hydro, or fossil fuels.
China isn’t doing one single thing… they’re rolling out more wind and solar than anywhere else on earth. They’re investing heavily in nuclear. They’re building massive banks of batteries and new hydro dams to store power. Pretending like they don’t have faith in renewables being a massive part of their future energy generation is just silly. They have multiple GWH+ battery projects under construction right now.
Yep. China installed 256 GW of new solar capacity in the first 6 months of 2025 (out of 380 GW globally).
To further put this into perspective, the United States had 239 GW of total installed PV capacity at the end of 2024. China is now adding more solar every 6 months than the US has installed ever.
Relative to the US, sure, call it 'hard' if you like.
Relative to China's total energy demand and current supply build out, coal still dominates (albeit near peak use in China and predicted to fall within a decade), renewables are where the bulk of growth and new generation is at, nuclear following a post Fukishima 'stumble' is planned to expand over the next decade, by 2035, to account for 10% of electricity generation (up from sub 2% now).
10%, perhaps even 15%, of total generation leaves a lot of slack that china plans to address with solar, wind, storage, HVDC transmission, etc.
Something I learned a while ago that stuck with me is that it takes roughly the same electricity to refine oil to gasoline as an EV uses to drive the distance that gasoline would get you, and that only accounts for refining, not transport and storage of that gasoline, loss due to evaporation, etc.
In other words, you can pretty much ignore where the electricity comes from and EVs are still better than gas cars for the environment.
EVs reduce climate pollution, but by how much? New U-M research has the answer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45110270 - September 2025
Across the US, EVs beat hybrids and gas in life cycle emissions study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45016172 - August 2025
Vehicle Lifecycle Emissions Calculator - https://vehicle-emissions-calculator.vercel.app/
The oil in a wind turbine would power a generator with the same output for about 10 hours.
I assume the big issue isn't electrical production at all, but rather the resource, energy, and waste costs of producing new EVs.
EVs are generally more wasteful to produce but their efficiency covers the excess in 1-2 years of operations, and can operate without meaningful maintaining for 200-300k+ miles and 15-20 years. There are no obvious upsides to ICE beyond political ideology.
Right I'm not making an argument about EVs generally either way, just saying that the cost of the energy used to propel them on the road wasn't the controversy.
For a lot of us, the question isn't "new EV vs. new ICE"; it's "new EV vs. current gen ICE".
I think the cost of energy to propel them was a common push-back. I've heard "the grid is dirty so EVs are dirty" from many people, and my point is that the grid composition essentially cancels out with oil refining, at which point EVs are "free" (to operate) while ICE vehicles still have to burn the fuel.
As for carbon intensity in production, I'd be interested to see a clear apples-to-apples comparison. High end products tend to have more emissions associated with them because they take more time, materials, transport, they're lower volume, higher waste etc. EVs have historically been high-end cars, or at least upper-mid market and up, there have been very few cheap EVs until recently, so if you compare the average ICEV to the average BEV, I'd expect the ICEV to be a lower end car, and possibly lower emissions by default as a result. Batteries will drag up emissions, but I'm not sure I've seen truly fair numbers on this.
If anyone likes data visualization. Australia are betting heavily on renewables for their 2030 targets (despite some State Govt's opposition ahem Qld) and it's pretty magical see this in action day-to-day:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&...
I'd also reccomend having a look at David Osmond's projections, where he looks at if we scaled up storage, wind and solar, by a few factors how close we would get to 100% stable and renewable.
https://bsky.app/profile/davidosmond.bsky.social/post/3lyhcq...
This, and other documents are important, but will not prevent continuance both of the misleading claims, and opposition to wind, solar and EV. This is because the opposition is oftentimes not rooted in logic and reasoning but in emotions.
If you don't like something, being told it's good for you doesn't magically make you like it.
A South Dakota county drove away millions in solar energy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244165 - September 2025
Preface to this is I generally do believe that renewables are cheaper, however I'm not entirely certain of how much because so rarely are full assumptions and details documented.
Storage costs, knock-on effect of intermittency, maintenance costs, etc.
Utility-scale solar is very unpopular in Japan. Because most suitable lands of them are densely forested, and installing utility-scale solar systems requires destory the forests.
There are concerns landslides due to reduced water storage functionality, and emotional antipathy at having their hometowns' mountains covered with solar panels.
How does the depopulation of rural areas contribute to this, if at all?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/15/in-japans-ageing-co...
https://theconversation.com/when-a-countrys-towns-and-villag...
https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/bcnga2/japan_populat...
(utility scale solar generators typically have a 35 year lifetime, so in areas of Japan where you’re not cutting down forests, it makes sense to build where depopulation is occurring in a “last person out shut off the light” sort of way before the rural community goes extinct)
https://japaninsides.com/japans-floating-solar-farm-with-500...
By far, my priority for energy policy, in the US where I live, is to lower the cost of energy.
After reading Claim 11, starting on page 29, where the authors state that:
>unsubsidized solar energy is now generally cheaper than fossil fuels; and
> solar energy compares favorably in terms of levelized cost (total lifetime energy production / total lifetime cost)
The authors build this argument over three pages, including several charts, citing a Lazard paper that prices solar at $60/Mwh vs gas combined cycle at $70/MWh. But only in the last paragraph do they concede that when you include the cost of intermittency (firming), solar is only cheaper than gas peaking plant cost ($168/MWh).
As someone who lives in New York City and is drowning in inflated energy bills, lacking any engineering explanation why my residential electricity $/MWh is triple that of Beijing, I am sick and tired of phony academic papers such as this that begin with a conclusion and work backward to fabricate extremely misleading arguments.
I don’t care how my energy is generated. I strongly prefer it comes from sources that pollute less. But that preference is miles behind the priority for cheaper energy.
Bullshit research like this, written by attorneys, including arguments like claim 11 which tries to hide the fact that solar only produces energy during daylight, annd does not account for storage/firming costs are not helping move our national energy dialog forward.
I am not an academic, so I'll leave the formal stuff to others. However I have been running a residential dollar system for 2 years, and tracking the numbers, so here's my data for what it's worth.
Firstly, as a return on capital spent, I'm seeing a return of 16% per annum. As electricity prices increase, that trends up.
Secondly we're purchasing about 66% less energy annually. In summer months around 85% of daily (electrical) energy use is self-generated. Most of our annual grid consumption occurs during 2 months in winter. (We still produce then, but not enough to run our electric heating.)
Next year I'm switching to an EV, which can be charged from my current excess (unused) daytime generation for approx 9 months in the year.
I can't speak to grid-scale costs, but for me anyway, generation cost is 0. (Capital cost was real, but return on capital is 16% and rising, which is better than my retirement account.)
So, if you want to reduce your energy costs, self production is the best route. If you can't do that, then it's unlikely that you (as the consumer) will benefit much. The supplier will likely supply at market rates (set by the most expensive source) and the gap is their profit not yours.
We may in future move to a pricing model that favors cheap electricity during the day, and more expensive at night, but at least where I am that's not a thing yet.
So, generally speaking, it's a lot cheaper to use electric over gasoline for transport. Electric from solar is cheaper to produce than burning fossils. Whether that translates into cheaper for you though depends on market forces. If you're in the US, we'll, good luck with that. It seems to me that suppliers in the US price based on what the consumer will pay, and less on input cost.
Of course all my numbers will vary a lot based on location. YMMV.
Excellent data here: https://www.offgridai.us/
>Bullshit research like this, written by attorneys, including arguments like claim 11 which tries to hide the fact that solar only produces energy during daylight, annd does not account for storage/firming costs are not helping move our national energy dialog forward.
Current cost: ~$140–$200 per MWh discharged (Latest Lazard LCOS reports). Price will get cut in half when sodium batteries production ramps up over next few years. Solar + Battery and Wind + battery is the cheapest form electricity outside of hydro.
> As someone who lives in New York City and is drowning in inflated energy bills, lacking any engineering explanation why my residential electricity $/MWh is triple that of Beijing, I am sick and tired of phony academic papers such as this that begin with a conclusion and work backward to fabricate extremely misleading arguments.
Majority of electricity cost is delivery not generation. In NYC, you have an aging electrical system that needed to be replaced 20 years ago. Then the billions spent to harden to system from global warming effects like Hurricane Sandy. Most of Coned electricity is natural gas and natural gas prices are up 50% compared to last year(August 2024 prices compared August 2025).
1. I am rooting for wind and solar generation but I am skeptical that sodium ion battery production could ramp from today’s pilots to the >100 TWh needed for grid-scale alone in less than 20 years. There is also the issue of transmission network buildout.
2. You’re right about generation vs delivery. I just checked and almost 2/3 of my $750 bill from last month was for delivery vs supply. Appreciate the reminder!
Do note that solar and storage is way more expensive in the US compared to elsewhere.
Storage in China is now down to $51/kWh and can piggy back on the grid infrastructure for a solar project amplifying its usefulness.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
> As someone who lives in New York City
Energy costs in NYC are double the national average, and little of that has to do with energy production and a lot to do with living in a place with extreme energy demands and infrastructure needs. And of course taxes. If energy prices in NY are driving you to the brink, you'll get a nice discount by living literally anywhere else.
So you're saying we can't use solar because at some point, a small percentage of the time (i.e., peaking demand), it's more expensive than an alternative?
Did you miss that overall it's still cheaper?
There's nothing stopping us from using solar and nuclear as a baseline and firming/peaking with the cheapest fossil fuel. And given the cost reduction in batteries that's been going on, I doubt fossil fuel peaking will still be the cheapest in the next few years.
They clearly didn't miss that it's cheaper overall, since they quoted that from the paper.
[dead]
I'm sorry, but this paper is disappointingly bad.
There are plenty of false claims about solar, wind and EV and they are worth debunking.
But there are also a few topics for which the real answer is much more nuanced (for instance claims #9, #12 and #13), where the claim itself is way exaggerated but there are still significant challenges to address, and treating those the same way you treat blatant bullshit is damageable, because of course opponents are going to exploit these to discredit the paper altogether…
I wish academics could be a little more level headed an avoid taking needlessly polarizing takes like that.
Read the beginning of false claim #28. This paper is such a joke lol. The authors agree with the "false statement" and then propose their own solution. I can't believe this is on an "edu" website.
If you read the claim they are addressing, it is specifically that
> Because of the wind’s intermittency and high variability, they do next to nothing to reduce the need for other fuels.
They then (correctly) point out that while wind on its own obviously doesn't work, it is still valuable as part of a grid system (with other sources of power).
Note that what they say (i.e. "as with solar energy, complete reliance on wind energy would pose intermittency challenges") is not agreeing with the statement, as the statement is that it does "next to nothing" and their argument is that it does a lot, when combined with other power sources.
Wind is extremely reliable. And it is relatively predictable, particularly on a short time scale. What it is is intermittent, which is a very different thing.
And by planning the locations well it's also less intermittent than one might expect, or you can build wind farms in locations with opposing wind trends so that you've always got something running.
How far away from each other are those opposing wind trends ? It’s one of the issues with the global grid in europe; if you look at weather patterns; all of western europe often tends to be contained in the same cell.
And assuming you can find those opposing wind trends not too distant from each other how reliable is that (anti)correlation.
That planning means you can ask factories to plan their energy use around high wind power times.
False Claim 28: Wind energy is unreliable
As with solar energy, complete reliance on wind energy would pose intermittency challenges. However, wind, solar, and storage together can provide the majority of the country’s electricity without compromising reliability
The false claim they're rebutting is that because wind is unreliable, we shouldn't deploy wind turbines for clean energy generation. They stipulate that it is a great part of a package of renewables.
Yes, the actual claim they are debunking is the subheading: "Because of the wind’s intermittency and high variability, they do next to nothing to reduce the need for other fuels."
I agree this one is poorly worded.
Yes, but there’s no evidence that storage can or will be a cost effective strategy to let solar and wind handle base load power. That’s why China is betting on nuclear hard instead of storage to backfill what solar and wind cannot deliver.
Sure, but our grids have plenty of existing natural gas generation, hydro generation and storage, etc. These aren't going to disappear just because we're building wind and solar. If you can go from a grid that burns natural gas 100% of the time to only 20% of the time, you've still cut carbon emissions dramatically. In the mean time, storage technologies will improve, nuclear might become cheaper, transmission grids will become better and more interconnected, etc.
The fact that wind alone can't get us to a 100% renewable grid isn't a valid argument to not build wind power. Solar and wind are the cheapest and fastest technologies available today to expand energy production while reducing carbon emissions.
I wasn’t making that claim. I was just highlighting how renewables by themselves are insufficient for base load power. Renewables often help with peak load and that is valuable, but base load is storage+renewables, nuclear, hydro, or fossil fuels.
China isn’t doing one single thing… they’re rolling out more wind and solar than anywhere else on earth. They’re investing heavily in nuclear. They’re building massive banks of batteries and new hydro dams to store power. Pretending like they don’t have faith in renewables being a massive part of their future energy generation is just silly. They have multiple GWH+ battery projects under construction right now.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/07/21/china-switches-on-its...
https://www.energy-storage.news/powerchina-begins-constructi...
Yep. China installed 256 GW of new solar capacity in the first 6 months of 2025 (out of 380 GW globally).
To further put this into perspective, the United States had 239 GW of total installed PV capacity at the end of 2024. China is now adding more solar every 6 months than the US has installed ever.
> That’s why China is betting on nuclear hard ..
Relative to the US, sure, call it 'hard' if you like.
Relative to China's total energy demand and current supply build out, coal still dominates (albeit near peak use in China and predicted to fall within a decade), renewables are where the bulk of growth and new generation is at, nuclear following a post Fukishima 'stumble' is planned to expand over the next decade, by 2035, to account for 10% of electricity generation (up from sub 2% now).
10%, perhaps even 15%, of total generation leaves a lot of slack that china plans to address with solar, wind, storage, HVDC transmission, etc.