Exhibit A · LinkedIn Slop №1

“Wind & solar are why your power bill is so high”

The inaugural specimen. Total certainty, a chart that quietly assassinates its own author, and a hand-drawn red oval doing the heavy lifting the data won’t.

The exhibit · as it ran

LinkedIn post by Jim Church (Retired Pastor): Every single country that has more than 33% wind and solar penetration of their grid has excessively high electricity rates. In fact, on average, they are more than double those nations that don't have such penetration. And that doesn't count the massive taxpayer subsidies given out to wind and solar suppliers. There is no way that anybody can with a straight face say that wind and solar are cheaper than other sources of reliable electrical generation.

Every single country that has more than 33% wind and solar penetration of their grid has excessively high electricity rates. In fact, on average, they are more than double those nations that don't have such penetration. And that doesn't count the massive taxpayer subsidies given out to wind and solar suppliers. There is no way that anybody can with a straight face say that wind and solar are cheaper than other sources of reliable electrical generation.

- Jim Church · self-listed “Retired Pastor” · LinkedIn

View the original post ↗

The takedown

It plots the bill, not the cost

It’s posted by a self-listed retired pastor, so a sudden, urgent need for data and hard facts to prove a point is…well…a notable change of methodology.

His whole argument hangs on one swap, and it’s a corker: it quietly treats your electricity bill as if it were the cost of generating electricity. Those aren’t the same number. They aren’t even in the same game.

“Cheap” means the cost to make a unit - the Levelized Cost of Electricity or LCOE. Lazard’s latest, unsubsidised, has onshore wind and utility-scale solar at roughly 4-8 cents/kWh - cheaper than gas, coal and nuclear, and the cheapest new-build for ten years straight. The numbers on his own chart run 20-50 cents/kWh. Everything between those two figures is tax, levies, grid charges and margin. In Germany and Denmark (his two poster children) tax and levies have historically been more than half the bill. He hasn’t drawn a renewables chart. He’s drawn a tax map and mislabelled it. Superb.

And then there’s the chart itself, which I genuinely love, because it does his job for him - against him. Look top-left: Bermuda, Cayman, Austria, Italy, Belgium. Expensive, the lot of them. Wind and solar? Barely any (Bermuda runs on imported diesel). If renewables caused dear electricity, those dots couldn’t exist. Better still, the chart prints its own R² right there in the corner: 0.37 - the chart admits that wind and solar share explains only about a third of where the dots land, and the other ~63% is something else entirely (tax, grid, gas exposure, how rich the place is.) The hand-drawn red oval is a lovely touch, too - nothing communicates analytical rigour like circling the conclusion you’d already reached with a marker pen (or Sharpie…)

The timing’s the wrong way round, too. This is 2023 data, still carrying the gas-crisis hangover, from a couple of years when gas set the European wholesale price about 55% of the time off less than a fifth of the supply. That was a gas shock, and the countries with more wind and solar got hurt less, not more: Spain, absolutely loaded with renewables, opened 2026 with some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, precisely because all that wind and solar elbowed gas out of the price-setting slot.

So: cheap to generate, expensive to tax, walloped by a gas crisis that had sod all to do with turbines, and undone by the chart-maker’s own R². “No way anybody can say it with a straight face”? Reader, I am doing exactly that, with a perfectly straight face. (And, I’ll admit, slightly too much enjoyment for a Saturday - but I love data, and loathe rhetoric.)

The evidence · walk it yourself

Walk the cloud

The same chart, digitised and put back on the table. Strip the red ink with the toggle, then step through what it actually shows.

hover a dot for numbers · ← → to step

01 / 06

Slop scorecard

Retail bill mistaken for the cost of generation10/10
Enormous variation shown with poor linear regression9/10
“Every single country” - written above a chart full of counterexamples9/10
Chart says the opposite of what the post says8/10
Own R² of 0.37 printed in the corner, posted regardless7/10
Conclusion lassoed with a marker pen (or Sharpie)6/10
“More than double” - the real figure is nearer 1.7x6/10

Aggregate slop index79 / 100

The data isn't the crime - the inputs are real (World Population Review × Ember). The slop is plotting a tax-and-subsidy-laden retail bill, calling it the cost of generation, and lassoing the conclusion with a marker.

Reconstruction digitised from the posted image. Prices read off the y-axis; shares anchored to Ember figures. Regression line and R²=0.37 as printed on the original.

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