OMG, I was wrong. You are that obtuse!
When you buy something, you don’t have to pay for it.
I admit that’s not what you mean, but damn that’s a beautiful sentence.
I’m sure you mean that you don’t have to pay to use it after you’ve already paid to obtain it. That applies to all these technologies, but moreso to solar and wind. You’d have to build your own electrical power plant for it to apply to coal, gas, oil or nuclear fuels. I’m willing to bet you don’t have one of those in your backyard. And even if you did spend billions to build one, you’d have to continually buy fuel to run it and pay an army of people to keep it running safely.
But when you buy solar panels or wind turbines, that’s it! You pay for them once and can use the electricity they generate for free forever with minimal maintenance (keep them free of debris). That electricity will be endless with enough panels/turbines. And if you buy a battery system like Tesla makes (again, once), you can even get electricity for free after the Sun has set or the when the wind isn’t blowing.
That’s never possible with non-renewable forms of electricity. That’s actually the definition of renewable energy, something you still seem incapable of grasping.
“Renewable” energy tends to be a lot more expensive in the end. Why is that?
Solar and wind technology were more expensive initially because they were new. Fossil-fuel and nuclear plants were also extremely expensive when they were first introduced and came down in price over time. The prices for renewable forms have come down sharply over the past decades due to economies of scale and competition. As more people buy them, they become cheaper because you can spread the cost of research and manufacturing out over more customers.
That being said, both solar and wind are already cheaper than new nuclear plants and almost cheaper than fossil fuels — much sooner than even the biggest optimists predicted. Coal is dying due to cheaper natural gas rather than regulation, something Victoria Lamb Hatch has already pointed out. And solar and wind do not have the external costs that other forms of electricity do: pollution, CO2, waste disposal/storage, etc.
What qualifies as “renewable”? The output of the Sun? The output of your solar panels?
The output of the Sun is renewable because it is endless. It’s that simple. No one has to expend energy to mine the rays of the Sun. They come freely to the Earth without paying a dime. This makes the electricity generated from it renewable because you have zero costs after the one-time purchase of the panels. You don’t have to put any energy into the system to get electricity out.
I hope that’s cleared it up for you. If not, I think we’ll just have to accept that you’ll never understand.
