Affordable, Reliable, Clean Scorecard: Natural Gas Is Tops, Wind and Solar Are the Worst
By James Taylor as published by Real Clear Energy on 22 April 2025
In the USA, policymakers on both sides of the political aisle increasingly advocate for affordable, reliable and clean energy. This is for good reason – modern society requires energy that is affordable and available on demand. Environmental concerns are also very important. Together, affordability, reliability and cleanliness form the three pillars of ideal energy policy.
Two new analyses evaluate competing electrical power sources and produce an affordable, reliable and clean scorecard. The two analyses – one published by Northwood University and the Mackinac Centre, and the other published by my public policy organisation, The Heartland Institute – independently reach near-identical findings.
Both analyses find natural gas is the most affordable, reliable and clean electrical power source. Not far behind natural gas are nuclear, hydro and coal. Lagging at the bottom of the affordability scorecard are wind and solar power.
Natural gas is easily the lowest-cost electrical power source, with coal the second-most affordable. Natural gas also scores very high for reliable, high-volume power production, as do nuclear and coal.
Despite some claims that wind and solar are less expensive than conventional power, the opposite is true. Wind and solar benefit from far more subsidies than other power sources, which merely shift their high costs to taxpayers rather than directly to customers’ electricity bills. Also, the intermittent and often unpredictable nature of wind and solar power imposes substantial costs on the grid, requiring other power sources to frequently ramp up and down – quite inefficiently – to cover for the variability of wind and solar. Finally, wind turbines and solar panels must often be built far from population centres, requiring extensive and expensive networks of transmission wires to deliver power to customers.
Taking all the above factors into account, a peer-reviewed analysis of full-system levelised costs of competing power sources shows wind power is seven times more expensive than natural gas power and solar power is 10 times more expensive. That explains why most of the world – and nearly all the developing world – is building natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants rather than wind and solar power facilities.
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