Engineering Overtakes Politics

While Republican operatives fume about the president's "War on Coal Country" and Congressmen cross daggers over the Keystone Pipeline, technological advances are rendering the whole argument moot. Prices for oil and natural gas may be falling, but prices for wind and solar power are falling faster, so much faster that in a decade there may simply be no market for electricity generated from fossil fuels:

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.

Right now this still depends on tax subsidies that will expire in a a few years, but that probably won't matter. The price of solar and wind power is not only continuing to fall, but the rate at which it is falling is not slowing and may even be speeding up. The price of solar power in some American markets has fallen by 70 percent since 2007, and solar promoters think it will fall by 70 percent again by 2020. Meanwhile, when the wind is blowing wind power is available for 1.4 cents/kilowatt hour in Oklahoma and 2.1 cents in Texas, vs. about 6 cents for coal and 6 to 8 for natural gas. Because of supply fluctuations utility companies are still contracting for fossil fuel-based power, but at those prices it will soon be cheaper to build power storage facilities rather than to keep using fossil fuels.