The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.

The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.

Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.

1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front.

2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.

3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)

As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.

> why it is not done yet?

Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize:

- It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper)

- Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm

- Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies

People, especially recent American leaders, do not make rational decisions.

They also have goals other than generating energy effectively

Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.

It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).

Because externalities screw with incentives.

Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.

Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.

Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.

It is being done, just not here.

Time, infrastructure changes take decades

It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on very abundant materials.

Once you have enough to power the world and are able to recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources for them.

If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?

Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.

No no, that argument is pretty old now. The amount of fuel you GROW on your own continent at any single or double digit percentage during wartime-anytime is probably a good long-term research project that shouldn't be interrupted by people online.

Why would you use diesel as input when you are making fuel? Just use part of the fuel you are making as input for the next crop.

> The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA)

My understanding is that the (unsubsidised) price of rooftop solar is only high in the USA. Because the cost is almost entirely labor (high in the US) and issues around permitting (more restrictive in the US). Pretty much everywhere else in the world you'll now save money with rooftop solar + batteries even if you can't sell back to the grid at all. Even places that aren't that sunny like the UK where I live.

It is still more expensive than "grid scale" deployments. But there are positive externalities that make up for that: uses otherwise unused space, less grid capacity needed, adds resiliency to the grid (if implemented well with storage).

Rooftop solar in Australia is ~60cents per Watt installed.

> Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on their roof

I don't think you thought this up yourself, so I won't blame you for it, as this exact, word for word swill is mindlessly repeated by a lot of people, so thats ample evidence of brainwashing going on.

The subsidies and retail rate (both of which have been murdered by now thanks to swill like this) incentives were not a sneaky reverse welfare program snuck in by the wealthy.

They were infrastructure incentives for people who could afford to make those infrastructure investments.

Investments have always required incentives and a positive ROI. You don't put money into your 401k, Roth or HSA because you expect to lose money in 20 years.

The goal of solar subsidies was never some sneaky wealth redistribution with unforseen sideeffects but rather to rally support from the private industry and wealthy homes to spearhead rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization.

A single mother treading water, barely being able to afford groceries isn't your persona for actually making rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization happen - however, the wealthy that you so despise of, certainly put a 10kWh (sometimes more) PV array on their 3000 sqft rooftop and actually feed power to the grid that was reeling under tremendous growing strain.

People hanging portable solar panels from the balconies of their apartments barely make power to run their kitchen fridge so that's out as well.

Mom and pop landlords and corporate run apartments aren't going to put solar for their tenants because they are not legally allowed to sell power above utility rates while they don't get the 10% guaranteed ROI that utilities get, so that's out too.

As someone who did make those investments back when a solar panel used to cost 100x of what they cost now and electricians who knew what solar even was were rare, I have sworn never to support a government program ever because it always ends up with me getting stabbed in the back once I've helped overcome the bootstrapping hurdles. I have better things to do with my time, attention and resources.

This makes me sad - We could have had a future where the grid was fully decentralized, where our single mother neighbor would never had to worry about the lights getting turned off even when there was a downed power line or wildfire or a snowstorm turning down power lines half a mile away, where she could plug in her EV into my shed instead of having to drive miles away to a crowded charging station.

Instead, I hear no end of how I used to benefit $1000 a year (NEM1) - a +0.33% amortized ROI - and now not at all, for feeding back Megawatts - Megawatts! of pure, regulatory compliant sinewave AC back to my local grid. My next round of energy investments are going completely offgrid because in retrospect, I should have gone completely offgrid right then, instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars in just excavation, fees and inspection costs to get a NEM1 system up.

Without having to worry about grid tie regulations, my family and I would have enjoyed having power while the utility company shut power off for days because there were wildfire conditions in middle of summer or someone damaged the transformer 2 miles away when attempting to steal copper.

If the public doesn't appreciate the 100% pure green recyclable energy I pump into the grid, I don't care about providing it. I certainly haven't recovered even the excavation and meter ($90k), permit ($7k) and "grid compliant" electrician ($6k) fees I had to pay for my "grid compliant" installation - expenses that would have been $0 for my completely offgrid, way more resilient installation nevermind being repeatedly lectured I was able to retire at the cost of people who couldn't afford to put up solar panels.

We are numbers people here - so here's a numbers perspective:

If I had taken the same money I had to spend on a "grid compliant" installation (so I could connect all of this to the grid) and put it into the SNP500 instead, I would never have had to worry about a power bill (as bad it is - $0.60/kWh) but also my inflation adjusted grocery bills for the rest of my life.

>you can switch the corn use from etanol to food

Not that easily. Yellow dent corn is not edible without processing. So to switch that to food use you have to have factories to deal with it.

You'd be far better off taking the energy from panels and using it greenhouses to get human feed.