Wind and solar technologies have extended their lead over fossil fuel generation on costs of new plant, and are now as cheap, or even cheaper, than existing coal, gas and nuclear power plants – even compared to existing and fully-depreciated fossil fuel generators.

These conclusions are made in the 12th edition of the annual Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis, which has become one of the major global industry benchmarks.

Its conclusions, both on the huge cost advantage of new wind and solar over new coal and gas plants, and now with existing gas plants – tallies with observations in Australia from the likes of Origin Energy, Snowy Hydro, AGL, Simec Zen’s Sanjeev Gupta, and any number of private analysis.

It should also give pause for thought for those – including the federal government – who want to design schemes that might encourage new investment in coal generators.