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Solar needs to economically stand on its own.
Tell that to the guy that is wondering how is going to pay his next electric bill.
BTW, wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuel generated electric, so it does stand on its own, but now the only people that will benefit will be rich people. At the same time Indiana businesses are hurt. The Republicans just created a lose-lose situation for Hoosiers.
If this is what winning looks like, I’d sure hate to see what losing might be.
I would agree with that principal if not for several critical factors:
1) Fossil fuel subsidies are HUGE. If we’re going to take away clean energy funding and investments, then we should do the same to the fossil fuel industry. Right now, that is not the plan (quite the opposite, fossil fuel subsidies have increased), which leads me to believe that this is a bad-faith argument.
2) There is a public ROI to investing in solar through a multitude of avenues (taxes collected from new jobs, corporate expansion, lowered health costs from poor air quality, reduced strain on the power grid, increased electrical generating capacity, independent home systems, etc.). Cutting funding for solar *does* have a cost. Contrary to popular belief, there *is* a cost to doing nothing. We’re going to have to figure out how to make up for these lost long-term revenues.
3) Coal is extremely expensive and natural gas, while far cleaner, is finite. I’m on board with nuclear, but even building out modular reactors will take 10-20 years. We need additional capacity *now,* not in some vague future. Investments in commercial solar by the Obama Administration resulted in a drop in price per KwH from roughly $10 in 2008 to just $3.25 in 2024 with a 40% increase in efficiency. That’s pretty impressive! There’s a genuine national security interest to getting residential homes, apartments, and commercial buildings outfitted with solar panels and energy storage. Largely due to massive increases in computing power, our demand for electricity is growing at a rate MUCH faster than our capacity to expand our electrical generation and distribution network. If more homes and commercial buildings are outfitted with solar and energy storage, strain on the power grid declines significantly. When you consider that the Solar for All program was just 0.103% of total Federal spending, this seems like a pretty good deal.
If I were looking at this as a businessman, pulling these investments would be a terrible move.
To the “solar should stand on its own crowd,” consider the following:
If it’s true that the shift towards solar is inevitable because it is cheaper, cleaner, more reliable, and infinite, and it is the undeniable truth, then the U.S. should throw the full weight of its resources behind it just like we did with the space race, nuclear bomb race, and countless other innovations throughout our history. To give up the race to China because some politicians are bought and paid for by Big Oil is fundamentally against American values. You are not patriotic, you are not “tough on China.” You are brainwashed and giving China a greater gift than they ever could have fathomed.
We’ll be the country of data centers, traffic jams, interminable school pickup lines, and smog. China will be the country with clean air, convenient and reliable transit, and cutting edge technology. They’re already so far ahead of us.
+1
China is kicking our butt. They’re zipping around on trains faster than god but we’re still stuck in traffic and willingly ceding our technological prominence to them.
When energy consumers do anything to reduce their usage rate the utilities respond by increasing rates to restore revenue lost to energy conservation efforts by consumers .