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The solar electricity industry is dependent on federal government subsidies for building new capacity. The subsidy consists of a 30% tax credit and the use of a tax scheme called tax equity finance. These subsidies are delivered during the first five years.For wind, there is subsidy during the first five to ten years resulting from tax equity finance. There is also a production subsidy that lasts for the first ten years.The other subsidy for wind and solar, not often characterized as a subsidy, is state renewable portfolio laws, or quotas, that require that an increasing portion of a state's electricity come from renewable sources. Those state mandates result in wind and solar electricity being sold via profitable 25-year power purchase contracts. The buyer is generally a utility with good credit. The utilities are forced to offer these terms in order to cause sufficient supply to emerge to satisfy the renewable energy quotas.The rate of return from a wind or solar investment can be low and credit terms favorable because the investors see the 25-year contract by a creditworthy utility as a guarantee of a low risk of default. If the risk were to be perceived as higher, then a higher rate of return and a higher interest rate on loans would be demanded. That in turn would increase the price of the electricity generated.The bankruptcy of PG&E, the largest California utility, has created some cracks in the façade. A bankruptcy judge has ruled that cancelation of up to $40 billion in long-term energy contracts is a possibility. These contracts are not essential or needed to preserve the supply of electricity because they are mostly for wind or solar electricity supply that varies with the weather and can't be counted on. As a consequence, there has to exist and does exist the necessary infrastructure to supply the electricity needs without the wind or solar energy.https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/what_it_will_take_for_the_wind_and_solar_industries_to_collapse.html
To make renewables work the people have to accept that access to 24/7/365 electricity is not a right is unsustainable and driving catastrophic climate change.
What It Will Take for the Wind and Solar Industries to Collapse
Renewables alone will never, ever work as all renewables require significant non-renewable energy to produce the renewables, whether it is tractors in the field growing biofuels to a factory in China making wind turbine blades or solar panels.They CANNOT replace non-renewables, EVER.
Remove the exception Obastard granted the wind farms that allows them to indiscriminately kill endangered birds.
What It Will Take for the Wind and Solar Industries to CollapseMy first guess would by for the wind to stop blowing and the sun to stop shining....
Easy! Stop subsidizing them! Make them compete fairly in the marketplace and they will disappear real quick-like.
I will disagree that it cannot, but agree that it will not in our great-great-great grandchildren's lifetime.The energy is there but the economics are sooooo very far away. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use. https://phys.org/news/2011-10-vast-amounts-solar-energy-earth.html
In all due respect, all you are saying is the single best reason to stop the insanity of renewables. It makes no economic sense, now and virtually forever.As far as energy, there is more packed into tiny atoms that can be split than whatever hits the earth from the sun.Go after that with technology already proven and economically viable rather than worrying on how solar can be improved.
No, the people just have to accept high costs. Energy Storage systems work, but they have high costs.
