One of the most common arguments against solar and wind is that they drive up the price of electricity. To test that claim, we compared two things for every US state: the share of its electricity that now comes from solar and wind (the green bars), and how much its retail electricity price has changed over time (the blue bars) — using data from the US Energy Information Administration and adjusting for inflation.
The result is that there is no consistent link between the two. The biggest renewable adopters are the wind-belt states — Kansas (~30% of generation), Oklahoma (~29%), Iowa (~23%), South Dakota (~22%), and North Dakota and Vermont (~19%) — yet their price outcomes are all over the map. Texas is the clearest case against the myth: it added significant wind power while its retail prices actually fell about 11%, the largest drop of any state (Nevada shows a similar pattern). Meanwhile, some states with very little solar or wind, such as Missouri and Michigan, saw prices climb more than 30%.
If renewables truly drove up electricity prices, the states with the most solar and wind would cluster at the high end of the price-increase scale. They don’t. Prices rose in some high-renewable states and fell in others — a strong sign that factors other than renewable energy are what actually move retail electricity prices.
Download the full spreadsheet from the link in the bottom right side of the embedded Excel sheet.
Code: m174 math xbMath