A new dawn.
Credit: Reuters/Marcelo del Poz

ABU DHABI — “Turning to renewables for new power generation is not simply an environmentally conscious decision, it is now overwhelmingly a smart economic one,” said Adnan Amin, who has the numbers to back it up. Amin heads the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), and the numbers can be found in a new report the agency released at its annual summit on Jan. 13 in Abu Dhabi.

In most of the world, renewable electricity is already competitive with fossil-fuel power. Better still, the report makes the extraordinary prediction: By 2020, all forms of renewable electricity will be consistently cheaper than power produced by burning fossil fuels.

Today, fossil-fuel power typically costs between $0.05 to $0.17 per kWh. By comparison, consider the global-weighted average cost of electricity generated by various forms of renewables in 2017, as calculated by Irena: hydropower ($0.05 per kWh), onshore wind ($0.06 per kWh), bioenergy and geothermal ($0.07 per kWh), and solar photovoltaics ($0.10 per kWh).

Offshore wind and solar thermal power aren’t yet competitive with […]