Renewable energy is cheaper than coal, nuclear

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

It depends on the country. Here, the subsidy is zero for coal compared to £1.7bn/year for wind

This simply is not true:
Wind power still gets lower public subsidies than fossil fuel tax breaks - 28 Feb 2012 - News from BusinessGreen
Environment and trade - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

What is counted in the stats I posted is not how much money is given to energy companies or something like that, it is the total cost/benefit for the society. A tax break of some billion pounds is a form of cost as well. Especially if it comes to distorting prices. A Starbucks for example (and these are real examples as well) only has to pay 1% tax on profit in Germany because they made legal arrangements with respect to franchising and evading taxes by not being one company on paper but many small ones - with the one making the profit sitting in a low tax country. The local coffeshop however has to pay up to 30% tax on profit, just like anyone else. Who do you think can sell the coffee and sweets for a higher profit, make more investments and expand further? And who could at least in theory even lower prices to a level that others cannot compete with. In this example the tax cut is unwanted, but it has the same effect as a deliberate tax cut for fossil fuels.
The key is how much net profit can be made with one scheme compared to another and so only the relative subsidizing is relevant.
And until this year, the UK subsidized nuclear power heavily as well - not just by tax costs as I understand it but also directly and most of all by covering all the costs of the risks - the nuclear power company will not (and cannot) pay for all the costs of an accident if one happens. As can be seen in Japan, the public has to invest a lot more than Tepco now - in the form of increased health insurance costs, more medical bills, land restoration efforts, drops in sales, export and fish/algae that cannot be harvested anymore. This is called the externalization of risks and is a huge benefit for companies.
A more hands on example are mines in southern countries - they make a profit by mining and selling the ores but when they are gone, they just leave the pit - the local people get sick, rivers are polluted and the public has to deal with the costs of that and any efforts of restoration for decades with the liability of the mining company being very low. If these costs would have been included in the price the company has to charge for the ore, they would not have made much profit or could not have undercut other companies who do have such plans of restoration of mine sites.

One of the main offsets of wind cost is the feed-in tariff: An additional cost of around 5p/kWh levied by the energy company to meet the mandated prices they must pay for wind energy, which is higher than profitable companies charge for other sources. This is typically excluded as a subsidy, but is nonetheless a hidden cost on the consumer

In the way of distortion markets it is similar to a subsidy, though it is more the second kind of influence of the public on corporate decisions - lawmaking, while the first would be direct financial benefits when dealing with the state. In the case of these tariffs, the costs of supporting wind power certainly will be reflected in the price of energy that people or companies have to buy, so it is not really a hidden subsidy at all, it is an increase in the price of energy. This is something very different.

Originally Posted by Clarke

I don't trust your numbers, sorry. There's too many variables behind the scenes that aren't being presented - for instance, the profit of the energy companies.

The energy companies always make a profit - they sell the energy to the price that they can get no matter where they bought it from. So they make more profit from getting it cheap. As I understand it, these numbers are the ones that the energy companies have to pay - to that price they add their profit before they sell it to the consumers. The numbers should be rather good because the newspaper that published it is one of the major and trustworthy ones in germany - it is read by a large fraction of academics of all sorts.