Grist: "A clever new study [PDF] from the World Future Council attempts to do something I haven’t seen before: quantify the cost of not using renewables.
Here’s the conclusion:
Protecting the use of increasingly valuable fossil raw materials for the future is possible by substituting these materials with renewables. Every day that this is delayed and fossil raw materials are consumed as one-time energy creates a future usage loss of between 8.8 and 9.3 billion US Dollars. Not just the current cost of various renewable energies, but also the costs of not using them need to be taken into account. [my emphasis]"
A Renewable World: Energy, Ecology, Equality (pdf)