It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
The technology and economics are there for renewables. The big barrier is political.
There is deeply entrenched ideological opposition to renewable energy at some (but not all) utilities, all the way to the leadership.
And just because an energy source is the cheapest, doesn't mean that it will be the one chosen by the entrenched monopolies that are our utilities. There are lots of bad incentives out there.
I don't buy the political argument. If it made financial sense you could just build it and take all your profits to lobby the politicians but obviously the economics are not very profitable yet.
Edit: How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
Make financial sense to whom? If solar is cheaper than natural gas, how does a utility profit from charging less? They are highly regulated, and are usually allowed to take a percentage as profit. So it's in their interest to take the more expensive option, depending on regulations
Saying that solar isn't cheap is just ignoring the past five years of cost data.
In the US, the rare instances of more open markets for electricity generation markets, like ERCOT, and seeing wind/solar/storage dominate over natural gas in new deployments.
This wouldn't happen unless they actually were cheaper.
However, regulated monopolies in other parts of the country have no incentive to innovate or use newer technology. Thus they make their five year plans (usually called IRPs) with opaque financial models with out-of-date costs, leading to bad decision making.
>How did Tesla succeed is GM and the oil companies were supposedly going to use politics to keep the electric car from succeeding?
Maybe a different way to ask the same sort of question is: What would the auto industry look like now if the political climate had been more favorable towards electric vehicles?
It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.