Renewable energy will always be too expensive to compete
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtSolar and wind are noble ideas but hopelessly costly. They only exist because of subsidies, and fossil fuels will remain the cheap option indefinitely.
NowThe International Energy Agency stated in 2020 that solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in history. Photovoltaic module costs fell by roughly 99.9 percent from the late 1970s, and in most of the world new solar and wind undercut new coal and gas.
What actually happened
The old position was defensible when it was taught. In 1975 solar modules cost over 100 dollars per watt, and even in 2010 utility-scale solar was several times the price of gas generation. What almost everyone underestimated was the learning rate: solar costs have fallen roughly 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative capacity, sustained for four decades. Compounding at that rate is very hard to intuit, and official forecasts, the IEA's own included, repeatedly projected flat lines and were repeatedly beaten.
By 2020 the IEA's World Energy Outlook was describing the best solar projects as offering the cheapest electricity ever seen. IRENA's cost tracking shows the global weighted average cost of utility solar dropping about 90 percent between 2010 and 2023, with onshore wind down roughly 70 percent. Auctions in sunny regions have cleared under 15 dollars per megawatt-hour.
The fair caveat is that cheap electricity when the sun shines is not the same as cheap electricity at 6pm in January, and the remaining hard problem is storage, transmission, and firming. That is a real engineering and economics fight. But "renewables cannot compete on price" is no longer part of it.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2015, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2020 learned the earlier version.