Cheap loans will not make inefficient alternative energy more efficient

Fuel Fix:

Cheap, below market-rate loans have been used by the U.S. government to do everything from bail out the U.S. automotive sector to help millions of Americans attend college

But could cheap money now offer the key to climate change, through low-interest rate loans to developing countries for the construction of wind, solar and other zero-carbon energy sources?

The answer is yes according to a new study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which was commissioned by the Clean Technology Fund, a fund to which the United States and other developed nations contribute. The fund is administered by the World Bank.

"For years, concessional finance has been recognized as a "secret sauce" for accelerating development of low-carbon technologies in emerging economies," Bloomberg said in a press release. "Pairing clean energy with affordable, flexible financing can make infrastructure like wind or solar power more cost-competitive, even more so than fossil-fuel sources."

Countries worldwide are seeking to cut greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But doing so in developing countries is proving more difficult, as existing coal and oil burning power plants are expected to operate for decades,

The report lays out that critical to reducing emissions will be reducing the cost of new wind and solar projects to the point they are not only cheaper than new coal plants but existing fossil fuel facilities as well.
...

Even if you use free financing it will not make alternative energy sources competitive with fossil fuels, because the alternative energy currently available is too inefficient and not at all dependable in extreme weather when it is needed most.   If the Midwest were dependent on it during the recent polar vortex, people would have been freezing in the dark and cars would have been stranded because the batteries lose power in extreme cold.  Solar does not produce electricity when the panels are covered in snow and the cloud cover would degrade its production if there was no snow.  Windmills have to be shut down in extreme cold.  Both would be unlikely to survive hurricane-strength winds.

Current alternative energy that is available is at best a supplemental source of energy.  It still is unable to scale up or down to meet demand and batteries on the scale needed for dependable energy are not currently available and the costs would be prohibitive even if the loans were free.