Energy
Solar’s Dirty Secret: Expensive and Unfit for the Grid
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Ian Madsen
To store twelve hours worth of the 1.6 TW total installed global solar power capacity would cost about 12.9 trillion Canadian dollars
Solar energy’s promise of a green, abundant future is captivating—but beneath the shiny panels lies a story of unreliability, hidden costs, and grid instability.
Green enthusiasts endorse solar energy to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from traditional energy sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The source of solar power, the sun, is free, abundant, and always available somewhere. However, these claims are misleading. Solar energy is costly and unreliable in ways its proponents commonly disguise. If adopted extensively, solar energy will generally make energy and electric power grids more unreliable and expensive.
The solar industry has burgeoned remarkably, with an estimated average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 39 percent from 2021 to 2024. Earlier this century, the growth rate was even faster. As a result, global installed solar capacity has reached 1.6 terawatts (TW), according to the U.S. Energy Department. This capacity is theoretically sufficient to power a billion homes at 1.5 kilowatts per home. However, the term “theoretically” poses a significant challenge. Solar power, without affordable energy storage solutions, is only available during daylight hours.
The minimum amount of storage required to make global solar power truly “dispatchable”—i.e., independent of other backup energy sources—would be twelve hours of storage. Options include batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, or other technologies. Since batteries are today’s standard method, the following calculation estimates the cost of the minimum amount of battery storage to ensure reliable solar power.
Twelve hours per day multiplied by 1.6 terawatts and dividing the result by one kilowatt-hour (kWh), we arrive at a final requirement of 19.2 billion kWh of storage. According to a meta-study by the National Renewable Energy Lab, the utility-grade cost of battery storage is C$670.99 per kWh.
To store twelve hours worth of the 1.6 TW total installed global solar power capacity would cost about 12.9 trillion Canadian dollars; a safer twenty-four hours’ storage would be double that. Total storage available in 2023 was, the International Energy Agency notes, approximately two hundred and sixty gigawatts (GW) of power – a tiny fraction of power production of 3.2 million GW in 2022, using figures from Statista.
No firms or governments can have the necessary storage to make solar viable even if the entire globe was involved, as the total global GDP was about C$148 trillion in 2023, according to World Bank figures. That is not solar’s only problem. The most harmful effect is how it undermines power grids. The misleading, ‘levelized’ near-zero cost undercuts traditional, reliable on-demand energy sources such as coal, natural gas and nuclear power.
Importantly, high solar and wind power output can make prices turn negative, as an Institute for Energy Research article noted, but can swiftly revert to high prices when winds calm or the sun sets, as the fixed costs of traditional power plants are spread over lower production. Baseload traditional energy sources are essential because the frequent unavailability of renewables can be dangerous. Consequently, overall costs for customers are higher when renewables are included in the energy mix. Solar mandates in California made its power supply wildly erratic.
Without affordable energy storage, solar is a seductive illusion; its unchecked adoption risks turning power grids into unreliable, costly experiments at the expense of energy stability.
Ian Madsen is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Dan McTeague
Will this deal actually build a pipeline in Canada?
By Dan McTeague
Will Carney’s new pipeline deal actually help get a pipeline built in Canada? As we said before, the devil is in the details.
While the establishment and mainstream media cheer on the new pipeline agreement, there are specific details you need to be aware of.
Dan McTeague explains in his latest video.
Energy
Canada following Europe’s stumble by ignoring energy reality
Family in Spain eating by candlelight during a blackout, April 2025
From Resource Works
Canada’s own 2024 grid scare proves we’re on the same path unless we change course.
Europe’s green-energy unraveling is no longer a distant cautionary tale. It’s a mirror — and Canada is already seeing the first cracks.
A new Wall Street Journal investigation lays out the European story in stark detail: a continent that slashed emissions faster than anyone else, only to discover that doing so by tearing down firm power before its replacement existed comes with brutal consequences — collapsing industry, sky-high electricity prices, political fragmentation, and a public increasingly unwilling to subsidize wishful thinking.
The tragedy isn’t that Europe tried to decarbonize quickly.
The tragedy is how they did it: by insisting on an “or” transition — renewables or fossil fuels — instead of what every energy-literate nation outside Europe pursued: renewables and fossil fuels, working together while the system evolves.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Canada has already had its first European-style crisis. It happened in January 2024.
Canada’s early warning: the January 2024 electricity crunch
Most people have already forgotten it, because our political class desperately wanted you to. But in January 2024, Western Canada came within a whisker of a full-blown energy security breakdown. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and B.C. were stretched to their limit. The grid was under cascading stress. Contingency plans were activated. Alberta came terrifyingly close to rolling blackouts.
It wasn’t caused by climate change. It wasn’t caused by a mysterious cyberattack.
It was caused by the same structural brittleness now crippling Europe:
- Insufficient firm power, after years of political messaging that we could “electrify everything” without adding real generating capacity.
- Overreliance on intermittent sources not backed by storage or gas.
- A planning system that punted risk into the future, betting the grid could be stretched indefinitely.
The January 2024 event was not a blip. It was a preview.
Our European moment in miniature.
But instead of treating it as the national wake-up call it should have been, B.C. did something telling — and deeply damaging.
The B.C. government’s response: attack the messenger
Just a couple of years ago, an economist publicly warned about the economic price of emerging system vulnerabilities due to a groaning stack of “clean economy” policies.
The B.C. government didn’t respond with data, evidence, or even curiosity. Instead, a cabinet minister used the safety of legislative privilege — that gold-plated shield against accountability — to launch nasty personal attacks on the economist who raised the concerns, which themselves had originated in the government’s own analysis.
No engagement.
No counter-analysis.
No willingness to consider the system risks.
Just slurs — the very definition of anti-intellectual governance.
It was a moment that told the whole story:
Too many policymakers in this province believe that energy systems obey politics, not physics.
Physics always gets the last word.
Europe shows us what political denial turns into
The WSJ reporting couldn’t be clearer about the consequences of that denial:
- Germany: highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world.
- U.K.: highest industrial electricity rates among major economies.
- Industrial flight: chemical plants closing, data centres frozen, major players hinting at exiting Europe entirely.
- Grid instability: wind farms paid tens of millions not to generate because the grid can’t handle it.
- Public revolt: rising support for parties rejecting the entire green-transition agenda.
- Policy whiplash: governments rushing to build gas plants they swore they’d never need.
Europe is now an object lesson in how good intentions, executed poorly, can produce the exact opposite of what was promised: higher prices, higher volatility, declining competitiveness, and a public ready to abandon climate policy altogether.
This is precisely what January 2024 warned us about — but on a continental scale.
The system cost we keep pretending doesn’t exist
Every serious energy expert knows the truth Europe is now living: intermittent renewables require massive amounts of redundant capacity, storage, and backup generation. That’s why the U.K. now needs 120 gigawatts of capacity to serve a demand previously met with 60–70 gigawatts, even though electricity use hasn’t meaningfully grown.
This is the math policymakers prefer not to show the public.
And it’s why B.C.’s refusal to have an honest conversation about firm power is so dangerous.
If we electrify everything without ensuring affordable and abundant natural gas generation, we’re not building a green future.
We’re building Europe, 10 years early.
The lesson for Canada — especially for B.C.
Here is what Europe and January 2024 together say, in one clear voice:
1. There is no energy transition without firm power.
Renewables are part of the system, but they don’t run the system. Natural gas does. Hydro does. Nuclear does. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with rolling blackouts.
2. Political denial makes crises worse.
When ministers attack economists instead of answering them, it signals that ideology is running the show. Europe learned the cost of that. We will too, unless we change course.
3. Affordability is the foundation of public consent.
Europe lost the room. Once people see their bills double while factories close, the climate agenda becomes politically radioactive.
4. B.C. has an advantage Europe would kill for.
Europe dreams of having an abundant, local, low-carbon firm-power fuel like northeastern B.C.’s natural gas. We treat it like a political liability. That’s not strategy. It’s negligence.
5. The transition will fail if we don’t treat electricity like the national security asset it is.
Without energy, there is no industry.
Without industry, there is no prosperity.
Without prosperity, there is no climate policy that survives the next election cycle.
What we need now
Canada must embrace an “and” strategy:
Renewables and natural gas. Electrification and realism. Climate ambition and economic competitiveness.
January 2024 showed us the future in a flash. Europe shows us the end state if we keep ignoring the warning.
We can still choose something better. But only if we stop pretending that energy systems bend to political narratives — and start treating them with the seriousness they demand.
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