Renewables Can Make Electricity Affordable — But The System Won’t Let Them
In The News: Affordability & Climate Action Series
The Bottom Line Up Front.
It’s well past time to make our outdated electricity system:
keep rates cheap and affordable with clean solar and wind power combined with energy storage;
one that is consumer-friendly, climate-friendly, and kid-friendly by making our air clean and their future bright.
When Negative is Positive.
All over the world clean energy is cheaper than dirty. More than that — there are times when we are producing so much clean energy that the wholesale prices actually go negative!
This year Southern California is experiencing negative wholesale pricing once again, as they did in 2024 when it went negative 15% of the year. The graph below shows electricity pricing going negative in New England.
This is happening all over the world. For example, “in France, the number of hours with sub-zero pricing nearly doubled this year compared to 2025, while Germany has also witnessed a 50 per cent increase.”
Ok, Why Not Already?
We can actually do our bottom line — clean, affordable electricity — right now. So why aren’t we? What’s stopping us?
Here’s what’s going on.
Our current outdated electricity system, with a power grid designed in the 20th Century for state-sanctioned centralized monopolies, won’t allow renewables make your electric bills more affordable.
Huh?
It’s all about supply and demand — except with solar and wind the system won’t let this most basic market dynamic work in our favor. That’s because when solar and wind supply more energy than consumers are demanding, prices can actually go in negative territory in the wholesale market if there is no place to store this clean electricity (e.g. batteries).
Why would clean power producers have their prices go negative? Because it can cost more money to be switched off and on, and some can still generate revenue via subsidies and power purchase agreements.
Affordability Needs Energy Storage
Ok, so why doesn’t the electricity system help with affordability and keep prices low by storing this surplus clean electricity and then releasing it when high demand would normally drive up prices?
Because our outdated 20th Century electricity system was designed for transmission, not storage.
For most power plants their energy storage was in the form of unburned fossil fuels, primarily huge piles of coal. They weren’t designed to store electricity, only to create it at centralized power plants and transmit it on demand via long, obtrusive, and vulnerable power lines. So in the 20th Century system utilities balanced supply and demand via chunks of coal, which they burned to create electricity when it was needed.
But today batteries and other forms of energy storage are already cost-competitive and are becoming cheaper by the day via innovation. We can dump the dirty stuff and store the clean stuff.
We Must Demand Affordability: Clean Power Via People Power
It’s well past time to nix this tired, dirty, old system for one that produces affordable, reliable, and clean energy for consumers. Now is the time for investments in power grids and energy storage that work for us and lower our bills.
And who is going to make that happen? We can’t leave it up to politicians on their own. We’ve got to push to have the power of renewables make our lives better and more affordable.
We need to elect politicians who will fix the system so that consumers enjoy the benefits of cheap, clean, affordable energy, and stop defending state-sanctioned centralized monopolistic utilities.
We need people power to generate the political power we must have to make our electric power clean and affordable.
And the best way to ensure that your power can make a difference is by joining with others in The Climate Movement to make it so. Join Us!
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