alt Hacker NewsI appreciate that you linked a paper to support your opinion on this matter, though I read the summary PDF a whole lot differently than you did. I’m not sure I’d blame renewables anywhere near as much as you did.
For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy demand.
Is there some literature that points to an idea that it’s faster to build a gas or coal power plant compared to a renewable one? My understanding is that solar is cheaper than gas, right? Even solar plus grid scale batteries are in a similar ballpark. And let’s not forget that other infrastructure like transmission lines and substations do not have any concept of renewable versus not.
The last thing I’ll point out is that we literally have to switch to renewables. There’s no long term versus short term, really, when we think about it. If we don’t make the switch we’ll actually put all of this planet in a lot bigger trouble than asking people to set their air conditioner thermostats a couple degrees higher.
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If you switch to renewables too quickly you will damage the investments in fossil energy sources that could be making big profits for decades to come.
Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.