Is it too expensive to fix?
“Too expensive” is an answer to a comparison. It only means something once you say: expensive compared to what?
Two things have to be on the same ledger. On one side, the cost of acting — and the price of clean energy has collapsed, to the point that solar and wind are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world. On the other, the cost of not acting — the mounting bill from the disasters a warming climate is loading onto the system. This page grades both, and keeps the honest caveats that a cheap headline price can hide.
What this page is about
The “too expensive” argument was strong when clean energy was a boutique product. It isn't anymore. Over roughly the last fifteen years the cost of solar power fell about 90 percent and onshore wind by more than half, and independent analysts — Lazard, IRENA — now find that new solar and wind are the cheapest way to add electricity to the grid, even without subsidies. Renewables aren't the expensive option; for new generation they are the cheap one.
The other half of the ledger is the cost of doing nothing. NOAA counts the United States' billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, and the tally runs to hundreds of events and trillions of dollars, with the count rising. This page grades the cost of acting (which is now low and documented) and the cost of inaction (which is large and documented), and is careful to mark where a claim is a measurement and where it is a model.
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Is it too expensive to fix?
'Too expensive' is a comparison — expensive compared to what? The cost of acting collapsed (renewables are now the cheapest new power); the cost of inaction is a rising bill of billion-dollar disasters.
Expensive compared to what
The question only has meaning as a comparison. Put the two ledgers side by side and the framing flips: the thing called expensive is now the cheaper way to build power, and the thing called free — the status quo — carries a rising bill.
| Ledger | The claim | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of acting | New solar & wind are the cheapest new electricity, unsubsidized | Documented (Lazard, IRENA) |
| Cost of acting | Prices fell ~90% (solar) and ~70% (onshore wind) since 2010 | Documented (IRENA) |
| Cost of inaction | Hundreds of U.S. billion-dollar disasters; trillions in damage; rising count | Documented (NOAA) |
| Net comparison | Acting costs less than inaction over time | Modeled (graded PROBABLY TRUE) |
Sources: Lazard (Levelized Cost of Energy+); IRENA (Renewable Power Generation Costs); NOAA NCEI (Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters). Details in each claim below.
The record, claim by claim
New solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of new bulk electricity, even without subsidies.
FACTThe investment bank Lazard's annual Levelized Cost of Energy analysis — a standard industry reference — finds that unsubsidized utility-scale solar and onshore wind are the lowest-cost ways to add new bulk electricity, below new gas and coal. IRENA reaches the same conclusion globally. Lazard's most recent work notes that renewable costs have ticked up recently on higher financing and equipment prices, but they remain the cheapest new generation. 'Renewables are expensive' describes the market of fifteen years ago, not today's.
The price of clean energy collapsed: about 90% for utility-scale solar and roughly 70% for onshore wind since 2010.
FACTIRENA's cost tracking shows the levelized cost of electricity from utility-scale solar photovoltaics fell on the order of 90 percent between 2010 and the mid-2020s, and onshore wind by roughly 70 percent, driven by manufacturing scale, technology improvement, and competition. This is the single most important fact in the cost debate: the thing that was expensive got cheap, fast, and the debate has not caught up to it.
Renewables are already avoiding large fossil-fuel costs — on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
FACTIRENA estimated that the renewable capacity added worldwide avoided roughly 480 billion dollars in fossil-fuel costs in a single recent year. Whatever the precise figure, the direction is the point: renewables are not only cheaper to build, they are already displacing more expensive fuel and its price volatility. The savings are a present-tense fact, not a future promise.
The cost of inaction is large and rising: the U.S. alone has sustained hundreds of billion-dollar climate disasters totaling trillions.
FACTNOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information tracks U.S. weather and climate disasters that each cost at least a billion dollars. The tally runs to hundreds of separate events and cumulative damages in the trillions of dollars since 1980, and the number of such disasters per year has trended upward. This is the bill the 'do nothing' option is already running up — the other half of any honest cost comparison. (Attribution of any single disaster is probabilistic; the tally itself is an accounting of costs, not a causal claim about each event.)
Major assessments find that acting costs less than inaction over time — but this is a modeling result, not a measurement.
PROBABLY TRUEIntegrated assessments from bodies like the IPCC and the International Energy Agency generally conclude that the costs of cutting emissions are smaller than the damages avoided — that acting is cheaper than not acting over the long run. We grade this PROBABLY TRUE rather than FACT on purpose: it depends on discount rates, damage functions, and assumptions about the future, which are genuine modeling choices. The measured pieces (cheap renewables, rising disaster costs) are FACT; the net-benefit conclusion built on top of them is a well-supported projection.
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III (2022) — mitigation costs vs avoided damages (assessment/modeling)
- International Energy Agency — net-zero and energy-transition cost analyses (modeling)
Where the evidence is strong, and where it stops
- The price collapse is not in dispute. That solar and wind got dramatically cheaper, and are now the lowest-cost new generation, is documented by industry-standard analysts. This is the fact the “too expensive” framing hasn't absorbed.
- Cheapest to build is not the whole system cost. The levelized cost of a solar farm — the per-unit price of the electricity it produces over its life — does not by itself pay for the storage, backup, and transmission that keep the lights on when the sun is down. Critics are right that whole-system cost is higher than the headline per-unit number. That is a real caveat — and it is exactly the subject of the next page, on the objections to solar and wind. It lowers the claim from “free” to “cheapest to build,” not to “expensive.”
- Inaction has a price tag too. The most common trick in this debate is to count only the cost of acting and treat the status quo as free. NOAA's disaster ledger is one measured piece of the cost of not acting; leaving it off the page is how “too expensive” wins an argument it would lose on a full accounting.
- The transition is not costless or painless. It requires large upfront capital and imposes real, concentrated costs on fossil-fuel workers and regions. Naming that honestly is not a concession to the “too expensive” framing; it is the difference between an argument and a slogan.
An argument that expired without being retired
“Too expensive” was once the strongest card in the deck. The prices moved; the card didn't. That gap — between a market that changed and a talking point that stayed — is exactly the kind of thing the The Climate Question hub exists to flag: a claim that keeps its rhetorical force long after the numbers stopped supporting it. The one honest remainder — that a reliable grid costs more than the cheapest new panel — is real, and it is the bridge to the stakes and to the next page, on whether the objections to solar and wind hold up.
Questions worth taking seriously
If renewables are so cheap, why do power bills keep going up?
Because your bill isn't just the cost of new generation. It includes transmission and distribution upgrades, grid maintenance, fuel-price swings on the gas still in the mix, and storage and backup to firm up variable sources. “Cheapest new generation” is a real, documented fact about building power; it doesn't mean every retail bill falls immediately. The two are related but not the same number.
Doesn't the intermittency of solar and wind make the real cost much higher?
It adds cost — that's the honest caveat on this page. The levelized cost of a solar farm doesn't include the storage, backup, and transmission a reliable grid needs. That raises whole-system cost above the headline number. Whether it raises it enough to change the conclusion is exactly what the next page, on the objections to solar and wind, takes up.
Isn't 'the cost of inaction' just speculation?
Part of it is measured and part of it is modeled, and we grade them differently. NOAA's tally of billion-dollar disasters is an accounting of costs that already happened — a measurement. The broader claim that acting is cheaper than inaction over decades is a model, which we grade PROBABLY TRUE, not FACT. We don't dress a projection up as a measurement.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Lazard — Levelized Cost of Energy+ (annual LCOE analysis)
- IRENA — Renewable Power Generation Costs (cost declines; fossil-fuel costs avoided)
- NOAA NCEI — Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters
- Utility Dive — Renewables remain cheapest, but their LCOE is rising: Lazard (2026)
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III (2022) — mitigation costs and avoided damages
- International Energy Agency — energy-transition and net-zero cost analyses