In all fairness, that applies to all projects, including fossil fuels. The things you mention, plus things like externalization of reclamation costs, etc, makes the economics a barrel of fish hooks.
That COULD apply to all projects, if all things were equal. But when you're directly comparing (supposed) production costs from a regulated utility-owned generating asset with a merchant-owned renewables asset, the advantage in manipulating the cost numbers is clearly with the PPA side of the equation. There's just too much scrutiny of utilities for them to do the kind of cooking the books that it seems is going on with merchant renewables projects. (I can't say about utility owned projects.) This doesn't even address the question of why you might be directly comparing assets that run with a 90+% capacity factor against those in the 20-40% range. My contention is that renewables pricing today is primarily about running the coal and nuclear plants off the grid permanently, not about making the most money. Even if that's not the case, their (qouted) cost numbers are in all likelihood the least useful of any type of generation.
