Politics aside, why not let the market drive the adoption of renewables? The former administration went to great lengths to penalize petroleum and subsidize solar and wind, without much regard for the damage this would do to the economy.

I'm all for funding the development of alternative energy sources, but forcing their deployment before they're viable is a mistake.

Define punish given the extreme amount of subsidies and preference given to fossil fuels? Did they subsidize renewables as much? Less? More?

Forcing their deployment is how you make them cheap enough to compete in the market without subsidies.

It’s how industrial economies of scale work. The more of something you do the cheaper it is. Bootstrapping an industry is analogous to overcoming the activation energy for a chemical reaction.

The rate of scaling is different for different tech, and it’s actually quite good for renewables. That’s because solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are incrementally deployable and subject to rapid iteration. It looks more like the electronics industry or, in the case of windmills, the car and truck industry, than the conventional power plant industry. Look up the rate at which these technologies have gotten cheaper. For solar annd batteries in particular it’s almost like Moore’s law.

It would never have gotten started without subsidies. Most things are deeply unprofitable at first.

Fossil fuels also require massive subsidies to bootstrap until they could scale. Look into the history of Standard Oil, the railroads, and electrification. The two world wars also helped.

One of the things that deeply challenged the minarchist libertarianism I held when younger was seeing that virtually nothing happens in tech or industry without state bootstrapping. Someone must be prepared to set huge piles of money on fire to start anything.

Once things get going they can be profitable in a free market. Solar is there in markets with high sun exposure. Battery storage is there in markets with a high power cost arbitrage spread. Both are still getting cheaper. Solar may be the cheapest source of power in a decade in most of the world.

Computing and the Internet is the same. The latter was originally called DARPAnet.

BTW the biggest disadvantage of nuclear vs renewables is that it is much more of a slog to scale. It doesn’t get cheaper as quickly due to slow iteration time and capital intensive large projects.