IRENA Says 24/7 Renewables Now Outcompete Fossil Fuels on Firm Cost as Solar-Plus-Storage Hits $54/MWh in Best Sites

Overview

The International Renewable Energy Agency on May 6 published 24/7 Renewables: The Economics of Firm Solar and Wind, a report that introduces a project-level cost metric for hybrid plants combining solar PV, onshore wind and battery energy storage, and concludes that round-the-clock renewable power is now cheaper than new fossil-fired generation in high-quality resource regions. According to pv magazine, firm levelized costs of electricity for solar-plus-storage range from $54/MWh to $82/MWh in high-irradiance regions, compared with $70/MWh to $85/MWh for new coal in China and more than $100/MWh for new gas globally.

The new metric, which IRENA calls firm LCOE, is meant to put hybrid renewable assets and conventional thermal plants on the same footing. Instead of pricing intermittent solar or wind output, it prices the cost of delivering a contracted megawatt continuously across the year by pairing generation with on-site storage. The framing reflects a market in which utilities, hyperscalers and large industrial buyers increasingly want to procure firm clean power rather than annual energy-equivalent megawatt-hours.

IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera framed the conclusion bluntly. “24/7 renewable power is now cost-competitive with fossil fuels,” he said, adding that “the long-standing argument that renewables lack reliability no longer holds”. In a fuller version of his remarks carried by pv magazine Australia, La Camera added that “today, renewables can deliver reliable, round-the-clock power.”

What the report’s numbers say

IRENA’s headline solar-plus-storage range — $54 to $82 per megawatt-hour — is for 2025 firm costs at high-quality sites. The same configuration cost more than $100/MWh in 2020, pv magazine Australia reports, so the bulk of the decline has come from improvements in battery economics layered on top of already-cheap solar.

For onshore wind paired with storage the geography matters more. Firm wind-plus-storage costs in 2025 ranged from around $59 per MWh in Inner Mongolia to $88 to $94 per MWh across Brazil, Germany and Australia, according to pv magazine. IRENA projects those market-specific costs to fall to roughly $49 to $75 per MWh by 2030 as battery prices continue to slide.

The fossil benchmarks the report uses for comparison are themselves moving. New coal capacity in China prices out at $70 to $85 per MWh, while new combined-cycle gas turbines globally exceed $100 per MWh, Renewable Energy Magazine reports. In the best-resourced markets, firm renewable hybrids now sit well below those bands.

IRENA also published a worked example. The Al Dhafra complex in the United Arab Emirates, which pairs PV with battery storage, delivers a firm 1 GW of clean electricity at around $70/MWh, pv magazine notes. For an oil-producing economy, the implication is that round-the-clock renewable power has already crossed the line at which it competes with new gas plants on commercial terms.

How the costs got here

The report situates the firm-cost finding inside a longer technology-cost story. Since 2010, total installed costs have declined by 87 percent for solar PV and by 55 percent for onshore wind, while battery storage costs have fallen 93 percent, per pv magazine. Energy-Storage.News reports the underlying battery figures: storage pack prices fell from $2,634/kWh in 2010 to $197/kWh in 2024, with another roughly 30 percent decline in 2025 alone.

Solar’s own decade tells a similar story. Solar PV total installed costs fell by 87 percent to $708/kW, and solar PV levelised costs declined by 90 percent to $44/MWh, Energy-Storage.News notes. The firm-cost metric is what happens when those two curves meet: cheap intermittent generation overprovisioned and time-shifted by progressively cheaper batteries.

IRENA expects the curve to continue. The agency projects further reductions of roughly 30 percent by 2030 and around 40 percent by 2035, bringing firm costs below $50/MWh at the best-performing sites, pv magazine reports. At those levels, IRENA argues, firm clean power would be cheaper than essentially every new thermal alternative on a project-level basis.

What the new metric is — and what it isn’t

Firm LCOE is a synthetic figure. It bundles solar or wind generation with co-located batteries, sizes the storage to deliver a defined block of power over a defined reliability period, and divides total project costs by firm energy delivered. The strength of the metric is that it lets a buyer compare a hybrid project to a gas turbine on the same dimensional unit — dollars per megawatt-hour of dispatchable energy.

Energy-Storage.News reports that IRENA’s analysis of 252 utility-scale solar PV projects in China in 2024 puts the minimum firm cost as low as $30/MWh at a 90 percent reliability level, rising to around $46/MWh at 99 percent reliability. Reliability is the lever: stretching from 90 percent to a year-round 99 percent firm contract requires substantially more storage, and the firm-cost premium grows accordingly.

That is the metric’s limitation. Firm LCOE is a project-level number; it assumes the hybrid plant is sized for a defined firm block but does not model what happens when many such plants share a grid, when transmission is congested, or when storage capacity is needed for week-long droughts of sun and wind. National grids that already lean heavily on renewables typically need a layer of longer-duration storage, gas peakers or interconnection on top of the firm-block hybrids the report prices. The report’s framing is therefore a strong claim about asset economics, not a comprehensive claim about grid-level system costs.

Why it matters now

The immediate audience for the report is procurement teams. Hyperscalers building AI training clusters, large industrials signing long-term power purchase agreements, and utilities hedging fossil exposure all increasingly tender for firm clean energy blocks rather than annual matched megawatt-hours. The Machine Herald previously reported on Meta reserving up to 1 GW of long-duration storage from Noon Energy to provide that kind of round-the-clock backing for its data centres. IRENA’s report is the institutional version of the same trade — and arguing the trade is now cheaper than the gas-fired alternative.

The broader policy backdrop is the COP28 pledge to triple renewable capacity by 2030. IRENA’s earlier April report on capacity additions showed the world adding a record 692 GW of renewable capacity in 2025 and crossing 49 percent of total installed power capacity. The firm-cost analysis is the cost-side complement to that volume-side milestone: not only is the world building renewables at record pace, the assets being built can increasingly deliver continuous power at prices that beat new thermal capacity. Whether that translates into the displacement of new coal and gas builds in markets where capital markets, permitting and grid interconnection bottlenecks dominate is a separate question, and one IRENA’s project-level metric does not answer.