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By Canary Media
By Canary Media
Canary Media
One of the biggest knocks against renewables — their intermittency — could soon be defanged.
As technology prices fall and industry prowess compounds, a new type of clean megaproject is starting to look not only possible but also economically attractive. These projects would load up the sunniest and windiest places on Earth with enough solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to deliver “firm power” 24 hours a day.
Such firm renewable projects could already compete with the cost of building a new coal- or gas-fired power plant in many regions, according to a new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency. It may sound fanciful to American ears, but projects resembling what IRENA describes are already getting built elsewhere in the world.
Wind and solar have for years competed extremely well on the basic cost per unit of generation, often calculated as the levelized cost of energy; they can generate electricity cheaper than anything that must burn fuel. Last year, onshore wind and fixed-axis solar tied for the lowest levelized cost, at around $40 per megawatt-hour globally, per BloombergNEF, compared with $100 per megawatt-hour for new combined-cycle gas plants.
But that energy cost metric doesn’t tell the full story, because solar and wind famously can’t generate electricity all the time. Utilities and grid operators have to pay extra for firm energy that can fill the gaps between renewable production and demand — and usually that comes from fossil-fueled power plants.
This dynamic has limited the transformational potential of cheap renewables so far. California, for example, floods the wires with cheap solar at noon, but even with its massive fleet of lithium-ion batteries, it still needs gas power plants to keep the system running through the night.
Breakthrough technologies could someday solve the problem of cost-effective, around-the-clock clean power. While enhanced geothermal is making progress, batteries that run for days on end and nuclear fusion are further off. But in the meantime, lithium-ion batteries, which tend to run for just four or five hours at a time, continue to get cheaper and better — making it conceivable to firm up renewables by overbuilding them alongside stacks of conventional energy storage.
IRENA’s report, then, asks how far you can push the clean energy technologies that are available right now.
To answer that, the analysts tapped their database of global renewable project costs and geographical profiles of solar and wind resources “to assess what it actually costs to deliver firm, round-the-clock electricity from a hybrid renewable system at a given site, under realistic technology and financing assumptions.”
The results IRENA found are startling: “In high-quality resource regions, firm renewable electricity has crossed the threshold of cost competitiveness with new fossil fuel generation,” the authors write. “The central question is no longer whether firm renewables can compete on cost, but how quickly the structural conditions needed to realise their potential can be put in place across the diversity of markets and institutional contexts prevailing globally.”
China sets the bar with its shockingly low cost of firm renewables today.
IRENA looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.
Beyond China, both Brazil and South Africa also can muster solar-storage combos “at or approaching” fossil fuel costs. The same is true in the Persian Gulf region — notable for an area with an ample supply of fossil gas. Developers can further reduce the firming premium by blending solar and wind, with their often complementary production schedules, alongside batteries.
The U.S. lags behind the rest of the world, with structurally elevated costs to build renewables (pricier equipment due to trade protectionism, higher financing and labor costs, etc.). Even still, the cost to firm up an ideal solar site in Nevada came to only $113 per megawatt-hour for 2025, with an expected drop to $77 per megawatt-hour in 2030. Indeed, all these projects become far more viable for firm power once you extrapolate the anticipated cost declines over the next five to 10 years.
What should we do with this information? For one thing, it does not mean that developers will automatically start winning contracts for 24/7 renewables at these abyssal price points. The authors make clear that they are analyzing technical potential, not structuring real-world commercial deals.
But publicly recognizing that potential serves a real purpose, especially when hardly anyone is devoting much airtime to the possibility of solar-wind-battery megaprojects for round-the-clock renewables. The study could serve as a wake-up call to the people who work on the grid — developers, planners, regulators, policymakers — that this new kind of project is worth thinking about. For large electricity customers like Google and other tech giants, it’s a signal to carry on developing contracts for 24/7 clean energy rather than fall for the siren song of natural gas.
Some developers are already pursuing a similar vision. Indian mega-conglomerate Adani is building arguably the closest real-world analogue at Khavda in Gujarat province. The company has not explicitly targeted 24/7 renewables, but is nonetheless demonstrating the present-day commercial potential to combine wind, solar, and batteries in prime locations to deliver power across more hours of the day.
Khavda’s barren salt flat gets blasted with intense solar irradiance and blustery winds, so Adani is blanketing the landscape with solar panels and turbines. The company started producing so much power that it added what appears to be the world’s largest battery to make better use of the generation and sell it for higher prices after sunset. Adani has completed 13 gigawatts of a planned 30 gigawatt solar-and-wind buildout, meaning Khavda is operating at a scale far beyond even the biggest fossil fuel plants.
In China, developers have pushed into the Tibetan Plateau, where dry, cool, sunny weather makes for highly efficient solar production, and high mountain ridges offer attractive placements for wind turbines. In some cases, companies are building pumped hydro storage to complement this production, tapping the mountain passes as a form of battery.
And in the U.S., developer Intersect Power has been hard at work on sites in deep West Texas that combine stellar wind and solar potential, in an effort to hit 24/7 clean energy production without needing to add too much else. Intersect initially chased this vision as a power source for green hydrogen production, which needs round-the-clock clean energy. But when that market failed to materialize, Intersect found willing partners in the energy-hungry data center crowd instead. Google liked the concept so much that it bought Intersect outright in December.
The IRENA framework shows that those projects aren’t outlandish wildcatter plays so much as they are leading indicators of a structural trend. With solar, wind, and batteries getting so cheap, entrepreneurial types are bound to smush them all together in configurations that unlock higher-priced, more valuable clean power. This will start at the most exemplary sites in the world and fan out from there.
Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen, and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.
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