This comment section is so weird. This seems like a decent analysis to me. It also backs up what's been pretty obvious for some time: solar is the future. Yet we have:

- Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there;

- Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion;

- Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way;

- There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart;

- Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that.

I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here.

Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting.

Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate".

So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity.

Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal.

Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy.

That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.