The renewables tricks

To stop climate change, we have to cover the world with renewable energy. So the more renewable energy we have, the better. 

Only something does not add up. There have been enormous strides in the use of renewable energy. But global greenhouse gas emissions have still been going up every year. 

Why? Because humanity have not built nearly enough renewable energy to keep up with rising demand. So humanity use more fossil fuels every year too.

Confuse

Governments and corporations around the world are ashamed of this, as well they should be. So they conceal it by using misleading statistics. They trick us.

But then many environmentalists and journalists repeat these lies. They don’t know these are trick statistics. By and large, they want to give us good news about renewable energy so that we can have hope. 

But false hope is no use in the long term. Our governments are failing. The leaders of the world are failing. We can only rescue ourselves and each other if we actually know what is going on.

This article lays out 17 different ways statistical tricks are used to confuse you about renewable energy.

Investment

Trick statement: ‘The majority of new investment in electricity generation last year was in renewable energy’.

The trick here is the meaning of ‘investment’. 

The total cost of a wind farm or a gas fired power station is divided into ‘capital investment’ at the beginning and ‘running costs’ each year to keep it going.

Most of the cost of a wind farm, or indeed a solar farm, is ‘capital investment’ at the beginning. Buying the turbines, constructing the farm and connecting it to the grid cost most of the money. The wind or the sun is free for the next twenty years. You just have to pay a small number of people to maintain the wind farm.

Most of the cost of the gas fired power plant is in the running costs – mainly buying the gas for twenty years. The initial ‘capital investment’ to build the plant is a much smaller part of the total cost.

So the capital investment needed for a wind farm is much, much greater than the capital investment for a gas fired power plant which produces the same amount of electricity over its lifetime.

So when someone tells you that investment in renewable energy was higher than investment in fossil fuels last year, the answer is ‘I should bloody well hope so.’

The statistic that makes sense for comparisons is total spending on renewable energy and total spending on fossil fuel energy.

Capacity

Trick statement: ‘Last year wind and solar power accounted for more than half of total capacity for generating electricity in our country.’  

Capacity means the electricity produced if the wind farm runs at 100 per cent of capacity all day, all year. Sometimes there is very little wind, and often some wind, but not that much. So a wind farm is doing well if it produces a bit more than 30 per cent of its total capacity for electricity |in any given year.

A solar power farm is doing well if it produces a bit more than 20 per cent of its total capacity in any given year. This is because it’s dark at night and there is less light when it’s cloudy. 

A gas fired power station is doing well if it produces more than 60 per cent of its total capacity in any given year. This is because a gas power station can usually be run at the same steady supply of gas all day long and all year long. Of course some technical factors and changes. That why it’s 60 per cent of total capacity, not 100 per cent.

In short, a gas plant uses about twice as much of its capacity as a wind farm and three times as much of its capacity as a solar farm.

The statistics you need to look for are the statistics for share of total electricity production each year. 

Electricity and energy

Trick statement: ‘Wind and solar energy had a 40 per cent share in energy use in our country last year’.

In most cases, the person is confusing total electricity use with total energy use. What they mean here is that wind and solar had a 40 per cent share in electricity generation. 

But every country now burns fossil fuels for many other reasons than just making electricity. The main reasons are:

They burn oil to run transport. They burn fossil fuels to heat materials in energy. They burn fossil fuels to heat buildings. 

In most countries, between a quarter and a third of all energy is used for electricity. Almost all the rest goes on transport, heat in industry and heat in buildings. 

To stop climate change we need to convert to using electricity for almost all transportation, convert to electricity for heating materials in industry, and convert for heating buildings too. In most countries that to go 100 per cent renewable we will need roughly three or four times as much electricity as we have now. That’s without allowing for economic growth. 

So if wind and solar had a 40 per cent share in electricity production last year, they had roughly a 10 per cent to 13 per cent share in total energy production.

‘Renewable energy sources’

Trick statement: ‘50 per cent of electricity production in our country last year came from renewable energy sources.’

When most people read this, they are likely to think it means that 50 per cent of electricity came from wind and solar power. That’s not what it means. 

When governments and official bodies add up statistics for renewable energy, they usually include nuclear energy, hydropower from dams, and burning biomass. 

There are problems with all these energy sources, but I don’t want to argue about those problems now. We would just get sidetracked. Because the really important thing here is that for various reasons there is unlikely to be much increase in nuclear, hydropower or burning biomass. Most of the new renewable energy will be wind and solar. 

When you break down the statistics, most of the ‘renewable energy’ comes from nuclear, hydropower or biomass. You are lucky if a third of it comes from wind and solar. 

Multiplying the exaggerations

These tricks can by multiplied to create very big exaggerations. For example. Let’s say they tell you that 50 per cent of electricity production in the country comes from ‘renewable energy’. 

But actually in this case only 16 per cent of that renewable energy is solar and wind – what we mostly thing of as renewable energy.

But this is only 16 per cent of electricity production. In this example, electricity production is only 25 per cent of energy use. So in this country, solar and wind are only four per cent of total energy use.

Which means we have a long, long way to go.

The falling cost of renewables

Trick: ‘The price of wind and solar have fallen by enormous percentages in the last ten years. This means that the wind and solar are now cheaper than gas. This is why almost all new investment in energy will be in solar and wind.’

The first part of this statement is true. The price of wind and solar has fallen so far it is cheaper than gas. 

Like everybody else, I expected falling prices would mean increased investment in solar and wind. I was wrong. Investment went down. 

Why? Two things happened. The first one was that when the price of solar and wind fell, the amount of profit to be made fell too. Investors like big profits. Big profits come from making and selling expensive things. So they invested less

The other thing was that solar and wind power had been expanding because governments paid subsidies to the private companies who built and operated the wind and solar farms. 

Then environmentalists, people like us, told everyone that solar and wind were now cheaper than gas and oil and coal. So governments abolished the subsidies. They did not want to be seen wasting money.

The companies selling solar and wind energy had been enjoying not just big profits but guaranteed big profits. Now they were making much smaller and more insecure profits. So they invested much less. 

Capitalism is weird. A good book by Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet, explains all this.

There is a way round this problem. The hidden problem here is that we depend on private investment. But it is still true that solar and wind are cheaper. If the government owns the companies making the electricity, the government can get a lot more energy for less money that they used to spend. 

Jobs and job-years

When governments want to exaggerate how much they are doing for renewable energy, they often use a trick about jobs. 

There are two ways of counting jobs. 

Let’s say that new solar and wind farms in Ohio means the state will need 50,000 new workers in renewable energy. 

But you can also say that your new renewable energy project will last ten years. So that’s 500,000 job years. 

Then, there’s a bit of slippage. You don’t say job-years. You just say 500,000 jobs. Most people think you mean 500,000 new workers. 

Ten years ago they were only doing this trick in the United States. Now it has spread to many other countries. 

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars

In the United States, when they announce government spending, they use a total for all the spending for however long the law lasts. But when you hear the big number, you probably think it will be spending next year.

For example in 2022 the Biden administration got Congress to pass what everyone says was the biggest climate bill anywhere in the word. Ever. $783 billion. Wow.

But this bill would last ten years. So that was spending of $78.3 billion a year. 

That would have added up to $783 billion over ten years, only Trump was elected two years later.

Look at the detailed budget

We’re staying with Biden’s biggest ever budget here. If you looked at the itemised spending in the bill, only $128 billion of the total $783 billion went to renewable energy (whatever that means), the grid and batteries. 

Over ten years, that would be $12.8 billion a year to renewable energy. 

Only Trump cancelled it all when he came in two years after the bill was passed.

China

Trick statement: ‘The future will be all right because China is doing more for renewable energy than any other country on Earth.’

But, in 2000 China had 2.87 tonnes of CO2 emissions per person. In 2024 China emitted 8.86 tonnes per person. That same year, 2024, the European Union had 5.66 tonnes per person.

The rising cost of the grid

The price of solar and wind energy is falling all the time. At the same time, the cost of the grid is rising all the time.

The electrical grid is the whole system of wires and cables and power plants that takes the electricity from all the places it is produced, centralizes it, and then distributes it to all the users. 

The more solar and wind we use, the more we need to spend on the grid. One reason is that fossil fuel power plants are big, and there are not many of them. But solar and wind power is made by hundreds or thousands of solar and wind farms. So that costs more.

The old grids had to balance the electricity all the time, so the amount of electricity coming in balanced with the amount going out, or the system would crash.

The new grids still have to balance the electricity coming in with the electricity going out. But the old suppliers like gas fired power stations and coal fired power stations were pretty steady. Solar and wind vary up and down all the time. And there are so many more points of supply. 

So the new grids have to be much bigger and more complicated. They also have to be smarter, because the job is much more complicated. 

And they have to spend a great deal of money on ways of storing electricity. Mostly that means batteries. The price of batteries is falling all the time, which is good. But the total cost of the grid and storage is increasing.

I have found it very difficult to find useful statistics on the cost of building new grids. But it’s big. It may a third of the total cost of renewable energy. 

Also, many countries cope with the rising cost by not connecting new wind and solar to the grid. In some countries the waiting list can be years. 

Percentage shares

Trick statement: ‘Four years ago solar and wind were eight per cent of total electricity production. Now solar and wind are 16 per cent of total electricity production. That’s an eight per cent increase in four years.’

At first sight, Wow. But look to see how much total electricity production has increased in the last four years. 

In many cases the percentage share of solar and win can even double, and still the use of fossil fuels increases. This is because the total demand for electricity is increasing faster than new renewable energy is being built. 

So when you see an increase in the percentage share of solar and wind, look for the statistics on how the total amount of fossil fuel emissions have increased.

Percentage shares (part two)

There is second trick in percentage shares. 

When people talk about increases in the percentage shares of solar and wind energy, they usually only mean the percentage share in the making of electricity. 

But as we have seen, that does not touch most of the increases in fossil fuel emissions. Those come in transportation, materials for industry, and heating buildings. 

Energy intensity

Sometimes governments promise to increase energy intensity in the future. Energy intensity means the amount of energy we can get from one barrel of oil, for example, or one ton of coal. 

Energy intensity increases every year in every country, because of increasing productivity. 

Business as usual

Trick statement: ‘We will reduce emissions to 50 per cent below “Business as Usual” by 2035.’

Business as usual means what the emissions would be if they just kept on growing as they have been growing. So if we do nothing, emissions from a country might increase by 200 million tons of CO2 by 2035. We promise to reduce that by 100 million tons of CO2.

Another way of saying the same thing is, ‘We promise to increase actual emissions by 100 million tons by 2035’.

The whole bundle of tricks

Now I’ll sum up what is going on. The people who tell you the trick statements are not lying to you. What they are saying is true. 

But they are misleading you, because what they are saying does not mean what you think it means. And they know that. So they might as well be lying to you.

But then there are all the other people who repeat the trick statistics. Most of them don’t know that the statistics are misleading. They are just trying to give you up. 

They are also trying to say renewable energy is the only way we can save the world. They are right. That is true. But that’s why we have to tell the truth about renewable energy.

This Author

Jonathan Neale is the author of Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs - Get a free copy now. He is also co-author with Nancy Lindisfarne of Why Men? A Global History of Violence and Inequality.