Renewables a Bridge to Gas , America’s Energy Goes Backwards

BY: Michael Barnard

Last Updated on: 21st June 2025, 08:47 pm

In recent remarks, John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy, laid out a curious and somewhat baffling narrative: renewables should serve as a transition solution toward expanding natural gas generation. Yes, you read that correctly. After decades of framing gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to a renewable future, the argument has seemingly flipped on its head. We are now being asked to consider the most rapidly deployable, clean, cost-effective energy sources — wind, solar, and storage — as nothing more than a stopgap solution until we can build more expensive, slower-to-deploy fossil-fuel infrastructure. This logic would be amusing if it weren’t deeply troubling.

“We need a bridge to get ourselves to 2032 when that gas shows up,” Ketchum said. “And when that gas shows up, it’s going to be three times more expensive than it’s ever been.

In his defence, Ketchum’s comments came during the Politico Energy Summit in Washington, D.C., in June 2025, where he was responding to mounting political pressure from Republican-led efforts to roll back clean energy incentives and reinstate fossil fuels as the backbone of U.S. electricity policy. Speaking to an audience of policymakers and industry leaders, Ketchum was not advocating for gas over renewables per se, but rather highlighting that America needs new electricity in the next couple of years, not in the 2030s.

With electricity demand rising rapidly — driven by AI data centers, electric vehicles, and broader electrification — he argued that solar, wind, and storage are the only technologies capable of being deployed quickly enough to avoid reliability crises. While the framing was clumsy and widely criticized, his intent was to underscore that the real constraint isn’t ideology but timeline. Renewables are the only tools fast enough to respond to near-term demand.

So what’s going on with America’s ‘cheap’ gas generation. Right now, gas turbines face extended delivery times, often ranging from five to seven years due to global manufacturing backlogs. This may seem puzzling given that global gas demand growth is sluggish or declining in many key markets.

The primary driver of these delays isn’t surging worldwide demand for new plants, but rather a combination of limited manufacturing capacity, aging production infrastructure, and supply chain disruptions still lingering from the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions. Many turbine manufacturers reduced or consolidated their production capabilities in the past decade, anticipating a market shift toward renewables. The remaining factories operate at reduced throughput, struggling with workforce shortages, supply bottlenecks, and rising costs for critical materials. Ironically, this manufacturing crunch is partly the consequence of the market’s long-term move away from gas.

By contrast, large-scale solar installations and substantial battery storage facilities regularly come online in under two years. In essence, by the time your ordered gas turbine is finally delivered, permitted, constructed, and connected to the grid, the solar facility built simultaneously would have been generating electricity and revenue for several years. Investing in gas infrastructure under these conditions is akin to choosing dial-up internet service in an era of fiber optics: it might technically work, but the opportunity cost is enormous and the rationale dubious at best.

A closer look at the economics underscores the questionable logic behind new gas projects. Even in the historically gas-friendly U.S. market, renewable power and battery storage consistently offer lower levelized costs than new gas-fired plants. Lazard’s latest analysis shows utility-scale solar and wind projects frequently coming in well under the cost of combined-cycle gas generation. Beyond cost, renewables offer price certainty. Gas prices, on the other hand, remain volatile, swinging with global geopolitical events and commodity markets. Locking consumers and investors into this volatility seems not just financially imprudent, but borderline reckless.

The cost of new gas turbines has climbed sharply in recent years, compounding the case against new gas-fired generation. While solar panels and battery packs continue to decline in cost thanks to manufacturing scale and technological improvements, gas turbine prices have moved in the opposite direction. Supply chain disruptions, inflation in materials like steel and rare alloys, and constrained manufacturing capacity have pushed up the price of large turbines by up to 2.5 times what they were a few years ago.

What used to be a relatively economical technology for bulk power is now burdened with capital costs that often exceed $2,000 per kilowatt for combined-cycle installations. These increases make it harder for gas plants to compete with renewables on levelized cost of electricity, especially as storage fills in the flexibility role once held exclusively by gas. The notion that we should wait several years and pay a premium for a technology that is slower, dirtier, and more expensive than the alternatives already scaling today defies both logic and economics.

The rationale further crumbles when we examine headwinds for new gas generation region by region. In the United States, despite recent rollbacks by the Trump administration of EPA’s carbon capture requirements, gas plants still face significant resistance. Many states have adopted aggressive climate targets that implicitly or explicitly discourage new fossil fuel investment. Additionally, social license issues are intensifying. Communities and environmental advocacy groups routinely oppose new gas infrastructure, using litigation and public campaigns to stall or halt projects. Banks and institutional investors are likewise wary of backing gas plants due to increasing pressure from ESG (environmental, social, and governance) criteria, effectively choking off capital for gas development.

Europe is even less hospitable to new gas investment. With carbon prices under the EU Emissions Trading System hovering around €90 per ton, gas plants incur significant financial penalties merely for operating. Even without a formal ban, this carbon tax significantly diminishes the economic viability of gas generation compared to zero-carbon sources. European Union policies explicitly direct investment toward renewables and storage, creating strong economic disincentives for new gas plants. Germany’s abrupt reversal of its planned gas expansion in 2024 provides a stark example. Despite a perceived near-term need, German policymakers backed away from a major gas investment due to mounting economic risks, policy uncertainties, and vocal public opposition. Building more gas capacity in Europe today increasingly looks like trying to swim upstream against both regulatory currents and market realities.

India’s experience highlights yet another dimension of gas’s inherent drawbacks. High LNG import prices have rendered the majority of India’s existing gas power fleet uneconomic and idle. Utilization rates have plummeted to historically low levels, often hovering below 15%. With abundant and affordable solar power rapidly expanding across India, policymakers increasingly see little reason to prioritize gas. Plans for future gas capacity additions are minimal at best, as the country leapfrogs directly into large-scale renewable and storage solutions. Why build gas plants that may rarely run when cheaper, cleaner, and domestically produced solar energy is so readily available?

China provides perhaps the clearest illustration of gas generation’s flawed economic logic. Although China continues to add gas-fired capacity at significant scale, most new plants run at extremely low capacity factors. The reason is straightforward: imported gas is expensive, renewables are abundant and increasingly cheap, and coal remains economically preferable in many regions (although China is burning less coal in 2025). Despite official goals to boost gas usage for cleaner urban air, plants often sit largely idle, used only sporadically to meet peak demand. Building gas infrastructure with no clear economic viability, simply as an occasional backup, makes questionable sense when grid-scale battery storage, pumped hydro, and other alternatives can deliver similar peaking services more reliably and economically. China’s recent experience during periods of high global gas prices when gas plants simply shut down due to fuel costs further underscores this fundamental weakness.

At this point, one must pause to ask a very basic question: why exactly would we build more gas plants after deploying extensive renewable infrastructure? The arguments for gas typically emphasize its flexibility, grid reliability, and energy security. Yet battery storage technologies and advanced grid management are rapidly eroding these supposed advantages. Batteries provide instantaneous response and frequency regulation far superior to gas turbines. Storage solutions require no volatile fuel supply chains and produce no direct emissions. The flexibility once cited as gas’s key advantage is quickly becoming irrelevant.

From a climate perspective, expanding gas infrastructure after investing heavily in renewables is even more illogical. The International Energy Agency has explicitly cautioned that meeting global climate goals means halting new fossil fuel infrastructure immediately. Even ignoring emissions, stranded asset risk looms large. With renewables and storage prices continuing to plummet, gas plants built today may become economically obsolete long before their design lifetimes expire. Institutional investors are increasingly aware of this, shifting portfolios away from new gas exposure. Investing in gas now may soon feel like having poured money into coal plants ten years ago, regrettable, costly, and ultimately avoidable.

Viewed in totality, the notion of renewables as a mere stepping stone toward future gas expansion is economically backward and environmentally misguided. It defies common sense. Renewables and storage are not interim solutions, they are already economically superior, technologically viable, and widely deployable options that have reshaped the energy landscape. The question is not whether renewables can bridge us to a gas-dominated future, but rather why anyone would seriously consider reversing progress to revisit fossil fuels at all. It is time to recognize renewables and storage as the destination, not a convenient short term gap filler.