As I wrote elsewhere, the US government and economy are now essentially a private equity takeover for a large segment of wealthy business: Squeeze out as much money as possible short term - including by issuing debt againts its assets, slashing and burning any costs regardless of ROI and with no regard for the future, and leave the bankrupt husk for someone else to deal with.
The treatment of fossil fuels and renewables fits: Block the obviously more economical and better long-term solution in order to shovel money toward the entrenched wealthy. That it sabotages the future due to climate change and economic inefficiency doesn't seem to be a significant factor to them.
I forgot, one of the entrenched corporate wealthy told us that climate change isn't a big deal, and we should send money to his and his friends for solutions.
I'm not anti-business; in fact, quite the opposite: These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone.
> This produces three results: it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy; it raises the debt dramatically; and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Clauses."
I don't disagree but it seems this time the good economy part only exists in their rhetoric.
> I'm not anti-business; in fact, quite the opposite: These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone.
Lets hope PG&Es price gouging kicks-off people to look for off-grid solution. EVs have humongous batteries, home batteries are getting pretty cheap. With solar + EV + home battery there is a strong economic case for a large number of people in CA to switch to off grid. Which makes PGE raise rates, driving more people to go off grid. California is a big enough market, which can create this new demand for off grid, new companies and economies of scale.
The green tech is completely under the control of governement even after it is installed and operational:
- Tax imports of panels and batteries
- Tax and oppose new installations.
- Only offer disincetive grid prices to those having panels on their houses. Low pay or negative pay to push to grid, higher cost to consume from the grid.
"The treatment of fossil fuels and renewables fits: Block the obviously more economical and better long-term solution in order to shovel money toward the entrenched wealthy."
This is also voter/public appeasement. There are many rural communities that depend on fossil fuel related jobs and will vote to protect them.
"These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone."
I'd be more inclined to share this view if the manufacturing were done in the US. But we can't really compete on manufacturing costs. Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
> There are many rural communities that depend on fossil fuel related jobs and will vote to protect them.
It's true to an extent, but technological transitions happen regularly. Everything we have now is a product of a prior transition.
> Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
Prices drop, and also the money goes to those who can innovate in the real economy. Manufacturing isn't the only sector of the economy, and we want to build the new sectors and industries, not the ones that were successful 75 years ago.
If only Musk didn't turn out to be such a twitt, Tesla was really supposed to be part of the solution but somehow Musk managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The future is pretty much in China now as far as green energy tech and consumption goes. Two bad elections and the US has basically lost world leader status in just over a decade.
I have to agree with you. I've heard competing claims that Musk is doing, with Tesla, something similar to what he did with Hyperloop: Promise a futuristic but ultimately impractical solution to forestall those trying to proceed with proven solutions (i.e. bullet trains) that might compete with his own business.
However, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the above paragraph ascribes genius to what is more simply explained by incompetence. It's more likely Musk believed he could make Hyperloop work, but couldn't. Similarly...
- Musk thought he could buy an election and gain the inside track for his companies, but was too witless to maintain good relations with the politician he bought.
- He bought Twitter seemingly on a lark and proceeded to rapidly run it into the ground.
- He put a bunch of script-kiddies in charge of DOGE, which promptly made a mess of an entire government and created a historically massive deficit while gutting government services.
- He alienated the core customer demographics that had formerly been one of Tesla's mains sources of income. (The other being government grants and subsidies which... whoops.)
Now, Tesla's shareholders are weighing whether or not a man with Musk's recent track record is worth a trillion dollar pay package[1]. It's gobsmacking that they even need to think about this.
So, no, Musk is not some evil genius undoing green energy by deliberately creating a false solution that fails to deliver. He's just a garden variety mediocrity who has been promoted far past his capabilities or character and has been utterly undone by the resulting ego trip. He's an object lesson in just how much damage the wrong person in the right place and time can do to the world.
Musk is a nogo poisoned brand in Europe... that damage his needless psychotic attacks have done won't be forgotten anytime soon. I'd happily buy chinese car instead of tesla just because of above, if prices were same. But they are far from same, and seeing their progress they may soon be better products overall.
Musk chronically over-promised and terminally under-delivered. There was no world where he didn't end up being a twit, just one where we aren't stupid enough to fall for his lies.
Tesla, in particular, boils down to how Americans respond to marketing. We love the idea of buying organic, environmentally-friendly technology that makes us part of the solution. It doesn't matter if Congolese children are dying in the cobalt mines to make EV-grade lithium ion batteries, us Americans need to virtue signal with our wallet. Buy the latest iPhone, save up for a Tesla, it's all part of the new-age jewelry we wear to make ourselves feel worth something.
> If only Musk didn't turn out to be such a twitt, Tesla was really supposed to be part of the solution but somehow Musk managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
this was never going to happen. the capitalist class are never going to be the ones to get us out of debt; they cause and benefit from it. it's his entire business model.
The rich haven't been about a free market in quite a long time.
I don't know if you noticed, but the discourse in right-wing politics that's absolutely nothing to do with Chicago school anymore. They don't even bring up free markets.
It's an acknowledgment that the entire economy in the US is cartel or Monopoly
> The rich haven't been about a free market in quite a long time.
I think that's just the Trump version of the GOP, and the Dems followed along, dismissing economics - an attempt at truth - for shallow partisanship. For example, the New York Times fired their economist columnists, such as Paul Krugman.
- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy
- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight
- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable
- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote
- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction
So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed
And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level
PG&E's most transparent fraud is by forcing people to move everything to electricity and then forcing them to use less electricity, and then complaining they aren't making enough money so that they raise electricity rates. Last year, PG&E raised rates 6 times. I'm now paying double the per kWh rates from only 4 years ago.
PG&E now wants to charge solar panel owners $100+/month just for the privilege of being connected to the grid. This is on top of their $0.41-54/kWh they already charge, the highest in the nation.
PG&E is a government-supported scam that is charging people whatever prices they want with no protection from our politicians because they are all on the take.
Isn't a lot of this the government insisting that PG&E act as the de facto California wildfire insurance provider and collect the premiums out of everyone's electric bill?
You have wildfires caused by, basically, climate change causing there to be an abundance of fuel (dead wood) waiting for any spark, exacerbated by decades of the government putting out every wildfire when in the natural environment the last fire would have cleared out the dead wood before the next one, causing fuel to accumulate even more.
At that point it doesn't matter what the ignition source is, that much fuel is going to burn, soon. If it isn't some piece of PG&E equipment it will be a lightning strike or something else. But if you can pin it on the power company because a tree caught fire from falling on a power line then the fire insurance companies can sue the power company instead of filing for bankruptcy, and then all you have to do is pass on the cost to ordinary people as $500/month electric bills.
This is a mischaracterization of the liability of PG&E for those fires. All of the PG&E-caused wildfires were due to inadequately maintained equipment operating well beyond its service life. The reduction of maintenance budgets to improve free cash flow and return capital to investors was a conscious decision by the company officers [1].
As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.
Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.
Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].
3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...
PG&E instead of constantly upgrading and maintaining their distribution system, decided to pay out dividends and buy back stock, as well as pay their CEO $50 million per year. That's why their outdated equipment kept starting fires.
They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.
Basically PG&E was horribly mismanaged for decades, that mismanagement lead to billions of dollars of damages and those costs were shifted onto the customers and the management got off scot free.
>wildfires caused by, basically, climate change causing there to be an abundance of fuel (dead wood)
There was a quite convincing article claiming the abundance of dead wood was due to bureaucracy more than anything else - two years of paperwork to remove a tree etc.
There are a bunch of places in California where humans shouldn't live that PG&E is required to provide electricity to and then getting blamed for setting fires... which I suppose it did set those fires but much of the state is being required to subsidize these inhabited uninhabitable places either through paying for fire damage or paying the incredibly expensive process of burying power lines which doesn't fundamentally alter the risk or rate of wildfires.
One of the many questionable political situations in California.
I live in CA, but am lucky enough not to be a PG&E customer. My winter off-peak rates are $0.12, compared to $0.43 for PG&E. On the other end, my summer peak is $0.36, vs $0.56. Absolutely absurd.
The arbitrage opportunities here are insane.
You should install an electric charger or two in your front yard and charge people 50-100% premiums to use your power :)
I live 20 minutes north of you. My power is in fact 4 times expensive in the winter.
BRB, Shopping on amazon for a 20-mile long extension cord
I moved across the road from this government owned power company so i was just out of Palo Alto municipality and suddenly had to pay 4x the price. Sigh.
It's a weird thing moving to the USA. Everyone's been brainwashed "anything government run is more expensive" yet every example I've ever looked into proved the opposite to a dramatic extent. Government run institutions lead to lower overall costs.
I would expand our solar installation as we expand our house over the next few months, but PG&E would force us into a less advantageous electricity scheme if we add panels, so shrug
PG&E should be expropriated by the state, but your 2nd point is just homeowner propaganda. NEM account holders really are free-riding on the grid in a way that is deeply unfair to the rest of PG&E ratepayers.
The US seems to be at risk of becoming a Japanese style economy in the coming years. As in they focus on tech that sells well locally, but is of no interest outside the country. And that can work for their economy and is a nice way to package protectionism. But eventually, people years down the road see how much better tech is in the outside world and jump to it and never look back. Then your own industry starts to drown and is only held up by a class of elderly people afraid of change.
Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.
With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.
And the sad thing this will just lead to a vicious cycle of protectionism for these companies. Their quality will decline. They’ll be more expensive than global products. US consumers will be the ones that suffer
The USA is a services based country, not manufacturing. Call me when Big Finance, Big Law, Consulting and Big Tech are threatened. Right they're doing quite splendid with cash rich piles.
The primary risk that China's auto industry poses is to Japan, South Korea, and the few parts of Europe with large scale auto manufacturing.
The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.
Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.
Yes, they've been using the Japanese model since 2020, and Japan only got there by making many huge mistakes. But essentially growth is dead and the entrenched businesses aren't going anywhere, they won't innovate and they won't be allowed to die, zombies.
Well, in order to compete, they'd have to cut costs.
You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.
It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.
We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.
Well, EV with a good range still costs more then a plugin hybrid with a small battery. Why US government should spent money on technology that is presently inferior to plugin hybrids? In few years this will change when the latest battery technology will be scaled up, but then EV will be able to compete against ICE or hybrids cars on its own without subsidies.
And in retrospect subsidizing EV by governments around the world could be a bad decision. If instead fuel taxes were raised or at least the subsidies went to development of more economical cars, then total CO2 emissions could be lower at this point.
plugin hybrids are essentially a lie. Data shows only ~19% less emissions than a gas car in real world driving [1]. For something twice as complicated as an EV, that will shortly lose any range advantage as EVs advance.
> (a) Double-down on investments in EVs (billions of USD!), even with a soft US market for EVs, hoping you might compete globally.
> (b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
It's (c) invest in plug-in hybrids that work everywhere. US customers demand something that can do a road trip without stopping to charge? No problem, and on top of that it will get 40+ MPG. European customers paying high gas prices? No problem, it has a 150 km all-electric range so if you keep it charged you never have to put gas in it.
Keep product lines and factories semi targetted for their individual markets. Ford discontinued the Fiesta in North America but they are still being built in the EU AFAIK. Major car markets product their domestic auto industry anyways so you're probably going to have to setup local production in any case.
Doesn't change your overall point, but just to comment on the Fiesta case (of interest to me since I drove one of the first model year's return to North America - 2011 - until earlier this year) - it only survived 4 extra years outside of NA - it's discontinued worldwide as of 2023.
The surviving vehicle(s) on the platform are the Ford Puma and Puma Gen-E, which are subcompact crossovers not sold in North America.
Do US car companies compete globally anywhere? Chinese people aren't buying GM cars. The US car industry hasn't been competitive globally since Toyota started making cars.
Both Ford and GM _used_ to, in Europe. GM got out a while back, with its remaining brands becoming part of Stellantis, the Dutch company who makes all the car brands that you can't quite believe still exist. Ford seems to have... faded out in the consumer space the last decade; they still make vans, and I think they still theoretically make a car or two, but you never see them anymore.
Chinese people bought about 1.8 million GM cars last year, which is down significantly from about 10 years ago before BYD and other domestic brands started putting out competitive alternatives but far from 0.
One reason for this that often goes unmentioned is the shale gas/fracking boom that made the US the world's #1 energy producer. That macro-level development allows the current administration to act as it does. If gas was less plentiful, more expensive, or primarily sourced from unstable regions, the economic math would be against them already. Western Europe and China do not have large fossil fuel reserves. For them, switching to green energy sources is not just an economic bonus, it's also a national security imperative.
Domestic sources of cheap, plentiful energy helped the US economy grow beyond expectations over the past decade, but it might prove to be a short-term boon that leads to long-term issues if the rest of the world's economy pivots away from fossil fuels.
> more solar means they can sell more gas/oil to everyone else
A glut in supply drives prices down. Oil extraction and refining doesn't have constant costs, as it is heavily dependent on geography as well as the physical characteristics of oil itself.
This is why there was a 3 way gas price war between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in the 2010s.
80% of the supply chain for solar is based in China[0]. As long as this is the case, it is unlikely there will be as much demand in the US for it due to new Cold War and bipartisan efforts to tariff solar panels from China
The article seems to leave this important detail out, despite talking a lot about China
I didn't expect China to become the solution provider for global warming while USA contribution to the world is mostly climate change denial. Yet here we are...
The fact that the US shifted their pollution away from something that causes obvious to anyone issues like acid rain to something that is more easily deniable makes it easy to deny climate change. The hole in the ozone layer stopped growing as well. Maybe it will take that level of problems to start in the US again for changes to happen??
Why not? China has/had the problem in their own backyard and we're likely acutely aware of the impact it has. Wouldn't that hasten their need to come up with alternative solutions?
Meanwhile the US is full of hubris and can't see beyond their own nose.
There was already an op-ed writer during Dubya's admin (remember when he was the dumbest president?) writing how their denial and non-investment in green tech was going to lead to China to be leaders in that space.
Sigh, without the Brooks Brothers "riot", the guy people insulted for talking about climate change would've been president...
I'll care when they hit (inflation-adjusted to now) 10ct/Wp for n-topcon (or better) glass-glass framed modules FOB by the truck/container load.
Because that (in Rotterdam) is the normal for central Europe these days. Except that they're already in a warehouse/container pile after their ocean voyage.
When one government bet on solar power failed (Solyndra) the message from the right in the US was, "look what a waste it is for the government to invest in solar technology," instead of taking the appropriate lesson. That lesson was that we weren't spending enough backing solar companies.
China shoveled billions into developing solar manufacturing technologies, and as a result they figure out how to cheaply mass-produce solar cells. Solyndra failed because they couldn't compete against the resulting cheap solar cells.
But solar panels are undergoing involution in China while there is mass youth unemployment. Alot of these are zombie companies selling at a loss and propped by provincial debt.
You're measuring success only in with regards to how it might benefit you as a foreigner, but dosen't necessarily mean it was wholly successful for the China.
The more depressing problem is that the US is raising trade barriers for solar equipment made outside of China nearly as fast. I think that the current administration just dislikes solar power, and only a part of that animosity is due to its tough-on-China stance.
"South Korea files WTO complaint over US solar tariffs"
The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs against solar cell imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia.
"A Casualty of Trump’s Tariffs: India’s Nascent Solar Industry"
I’d be curious how much of the goal of the tariffs is for solar actually produced in those countries vs just slightly modified goods from China. That’s one reason tariffs don’t work when they aren’t applied universally
I don’t doubt that another benefit is the current admin just simply doesn’t like solar of course
Lots of articles about how solar panels are even less expensive than traditional fence panels; it's incredible. If I had a suitable property I would be installing them even in Seattle area where it's cloudy and dark for a significant part of the year (summers are pure sun though!).
Slight aside, but fence panels in the US have a monopoly problem: Most of the manufacturers got taken over, consolidated, and owned by private equity. That's why they're so expensive.
Animal vets, plumbers, HVAC, and other industries too.
Has storage been solved yet? In my experience US power companies hate crediting pushback to the grid because it all happens at the same time during peak sunlight hours and then customers get to use those credits at night and during the winter which the power company thinks is unfair. In Idaho at least the power companies were able to change the laws so that you get much fewer credits for solar panels on your roof which means they aren't great unless you can figure out how to store the generated energy inexpensively.
Personally I like the idea of an electric car doubling as a house battery but so far I think only the F-150 lightning is capable of doing that.
In general yes, grid solar + grid batteries are cheaper than any peaking power plants. So now 24/7 batteries + wind + solar generally outcompetes nuclear, coal, or natural gas on price as long as there’s no tariffs involved.
This isn’t enough to make batteries + solar viable in Alaska but long distance transmission lines could solve that issue cost effectively.
Solar is actually viable in places like Alaska and Finland. It just isn't viable in the winter, but in the summer it is extra viable. Greenhouses (another form of solar) also work wonders in Alaska, and outside they can grow the biggest pumpkins you'll ever see anywhere.
Places in California has this problem too. Installing solar panels today could result in a larger electricity bill than not having them.
Getting solar panels forces you onto a plan in which they charge more per kwh pulled from the grid. The surplus electricity is only credited at the generation cost which is only 1/4 the total cost per kwh. (Delivery costs is 3x the price of electricity).
So if you want to go solar to save money you need both batteries and solar panels which is not an insignificant amount of money.
The most likely is that storage will never be "solved".
We will run with 100% renewables for years, and there will still be people asking if storage has been solved already. We will just solve every large issue, and suffer lots of small issues.
Also, if you are using your car as a battery, you can't use it as a car. It's more likely that you will have extra batteries at home so that you can charge your car when you want.
No, but it's cheaper than it ever was and panels are so cheap that they can have ROI even without storage. That said, grid solar makes the most financial sense if you're not in an off-grid location.
Carful when saying it’s not cheaper, it’s generally profitable to add some batteries to a solar power plant.
The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.
Maybe just force grid-connected solar installations that want credit (any size) and even those that just want to be grid-tied (beyond some small size like maybe 5 panels/2kW worth of MPPT) to use a registering meter that meters net energy for each like 15 min interval (that's the granularity we use in central Europe; I assume the US would have come to a similar choice of granularity), and bills energy according to market rate and appropriately handles connection capacity/transformer capex by like taking a histogram of those individual measurements or otherwise letting a few isolated bursts through while ensuring transformer capacity is paid for by those responsible for the (hypothetical, until it's not) transformer upgrade.
> In my experience US power companies hate crediting pushback to the grid because it all happens at the same time during peak sunlight hours and then customers get to use those credits at night and during the winter which the power company thinks is unfair.
I'm pretty sure PG&E pays back something like only 5% of the generation of my solar panels. I'll end the year with $400 more generated than used, and I'll get a check for $20...
I assume that the extra regular (daily?) cycling of the battery in your car would have a notable effect on your vehicle battery's longevity. (But I'm very fuzzy on how battery improvements in the past ~decade have applied to "cycle life", or really even what the cycle life means, e.g. is end of life when it's something like 70% of total original capacity?)
Rooftop solar is nice for resiliency and can have its place in a grid, but it's not cost effective. Grid-scale solar is what most folks are talking about when they say solar boom. Even in the somewhat backwards US, where Solar in total is ~340TWh, the majority (~250TWh?) comes from grid-scale interconnected solar and solar+battery installations. Hopefully this gap continues to grow as the Biden-era IRA fueled grid-scale solar projects mature through their design/build/deploy pipelines in the coming years.
Thinking of national policy from a home owner perspective is expected, but it isn't always instructive.
For the latter item, my Rivian has a relatively paltry 1500W inverter with standard 110W plugs in the back seat, truck bed, and gear tunnel, but I can use a rectifier/power supply to pull a constant 1kW, step that back to DC and feed it into my home's battery backup system. My whole house tends to use ~2kW at peak, and obviously can conserve in outages. So I get my normal 4kWh battery bank with solar hookups, but can splice the 141kWh Rivian battery in, too, for a good chunk of off-grid power.
No matter how fast you run, you won't win a race where you're just going back and forth nonstop.
It really does feel like the US is completely hosed when it comes to energy (and thus, industrial relevance broadly). Every 4 years we make a bigger bet in the opposite direction of the last, and meanwhile the entire world moves on without us. At least now it feels like no matter what the US does we'll make progress on climate goals as a species, even if in 50 years the US is still building coal plants and criminalizing home solar.
Readit News
The treatment of fossil fuels and renewables fits: Block the obviously more economical and better long-term solution in order to shovel money toward the entrenched wealthy. That it sabotages the future due to climate change and economic inefficiency doesn't seem to be a significant factor to them.
I forgot, one of the entrenched corporate wealthy told us that climate change isn't a big deal, and we should send money to his and his friends for solutions.
I'm not anti-business; in fact, quite the opposite: These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone.
I don't disagree but it seems this time the good economy part only exists in their rhetoric.
Is that happening though?
Lets hope PG&Es price gouging kicks-off people to look for off-grid solution. EVs have humongous batteries, home batteries are getting pretty cheap. With solar + EV + home battery there is a strong economic case for a large number of people in CA to switch to off grid. Which makes PGE raise rates, driving more people to go off grid. California is a big enough market, which can create this new demand for off grid, new companies and economies of scale.
- Tax imports of panels and batteries
- Tax and oppose new installations.
- Only offer disincetive grid prices to those having panels on their houses. Low pay or negative pay to push to grid, higher cost to consume from the grid.
- Tax installed panels, even off-grid ones.
- Introduce new onerous "safety" requirements.
This is also voter/public appeasement. There are many rural communities that depend on fossil fuel related jobs and will vote to protect them.
"These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone."
I'd be more inclined to share this view if the manufacturing were done in the US. But we can't really compete on manufacturing costs. Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
It's true to an extent, but technological transitions happen regularly. Everything we have now is a product of a prior transition.
> Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
Prices drop, and also the money goes to those who can innovate in the real economy. Manufacturing isn't the only sector of the economy, and we want to build the new sectors and industries, not the ones that were successful 75 years ago.
The future is pretty much in China now as far as green energy tech and consumption goes. Two bad elections and the US has basically lost world leader status in just over a decade.
However, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the above paragraph ascribes genius to what is more simply explained by incompetence. It's more likely Musk believed he could make Hyperloop work, but couldn't. Similarly...
- Musk thought he could buy an election and gain the inside track for his companies, but was too witless to maintain good relations with the politician he bought.
- He bought Twitter seemingly on a lark and proceeded to rapidly run it into the ground.
- He put a bunch of script-kiddies in charge of DOGE, which promptly made a mess of an entire government and created a historically massive deficit while gutting government services.
- He alienated the core customer demographics that had formerly been one of Tesla's mains sources of income. (The other being government grants and subsidies which... whoops.)
Now, Tesla's shareholders are weighing whether or not a man with Musk's recent track record is worth a trillion dollar pay package[1]. It's gobsmacking that they even need to think about this.
So, no, Musk is not some evil genius undoing green energy by deliberately creating a false solution that fails to deliver. He's just a garden variety mediocrity who has been promoted far past his capabilities or character and has been utterly undone by the resulting ego trip. He's an object lesson in just how much damage the wrong person in the right place and time can do to the world.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/musk-could-leave...
Tesla, in particular, boils down to how Americans respond to marketing. We love the idea of buying organic, environmentally-friendly technology that makes us part of the solution. It doesn't matter if Congolese children are dying in the cobalt mines to make EV-grade lithium ion batteries, us Americans need to virtue signal with our wallet. Buy the latest iPhone, save up for a Tesla, it's all part of the new-age jewelry we wear to make ourselves feel worth something.
It was damn good marketing.
this was never going to happen. the capitalist class are never going to be the ones to get us out of debt; they cause and benefit from it. it's his entire business model.
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I don't know if you noticed, but the discourse in right-wing politics that's absolutely nothing to do with Chicago school anymore. They don't even bring up free markets.
It's an acknowledgment that the entire economy in the US is cartel or Monopoly
I think that's just the Trump version of the GOP, and the Dems followed along, dismissing economics - an attempt at truth - for shallow partisanship. For example, the New York Times fired their economist columnists, such as Paul Krugman.
But let's look at the structure for a bit...
- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy
- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight
- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable
- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote
- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction
So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed
And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level
Dead Comment
PG&E now wants to charge solar panel owners $100+/month just for the privilege of being connected to the grid. This is on top of their $0.41-54/kWh they already charge, the highest in the nation.
PG&E is a government-supported scam that is charging people whatever prices they want with no protection from our politicians because they are all on the take.
You have wildfires caused by, basically, climate change causing there to be an abundance of fuel (dead wood) waiting for any spark, exacerbated by decades of the government putting out every wildfire when in the natural environment the last fire would have cleared out the dead wood before the next one, causing fuel to accumulate even more.
At that point it doesn't matter what the ignition source is, that much fuel is going to burn, soon. If it isn't some piece of PG&E equipment it will be a lightning strike or something else. But if you can pin it on the power company because a tree caught fire from falling on a power line then the fire insurance companies can sue the power company instead of filing for bankruptcy, and then all you have to do is pass on the cost to ordinary people as $500/month electric bills.
As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.
Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.
Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].
1. How PG&E missed its chance to prevent the Camp Fire: Damning report on utility’s negligence, https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24357122...
2. Pacific Gas & Electric EPS - Earnings per Share 2011-2025 | PCG, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...
3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...
They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.
There was a quite convincing article claiming the abundance of dead wood was due to bureaucracy more than anything else - two years of paperwork to remove a tree etc.
One of the many questionable political situations in California.
I live 20 minutes north of you. My power is in fact 4 times expensive in the winter.
BRB, Shopping on amazon for a 20-mile long extension cord
I moved across the road from this government owned power company so i was just out of Palo Alto municipality and suddenly had to pay 4x the price. Sigh.
It's a weird thing moving to the USA. Everyone's been brainwashed "anything government run is more expensive" yet every example I've ever looked into proved the opposite to a dramatic extent. Government run institutions lead to lower overall costs.
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Can you say more about this? I don't live in California, so I'm not familiar with what you mean.
https://www.finegroupre.com/blog/no-more-gas/
This is all the while cost of the alternative -- electric power -- goes up at least 10% YOY
Imagine you're a US car manufacturer. You see EVs growing around the world, and stagnating in the US. Do you:
(a) Double-down on investments in EVs (billions of USD!), even with a soft US market for EVs, hoping you might compete globally.
(b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
When other countries subsidize consumers to buy EVs, and the US does not, it effectively creates a self-own trade barrier for domestic companies.
Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.
With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.
The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.
Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.
You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.
It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.
We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.
And in retrospect subsidizing EV by governments around the world could be a bad decision. If instead fuel taxes were raised or at least the subsidies went to development of more economical cars, then total CO2 emissions could be lower at this point.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
> (b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
It's (c) invest in plug-in hybrids that work everywhere. US customers demand something that can do a road trip without stopping to charge? No problem, and on top of that it will get 40+ MPG. European customers paying high gas prices? No problem, it has a 150 km all-electric range so if you keep it charged you never have to put gas in it.
Keep product lines and factories semi targetted for their individual markets. Ford discontinued the Fiesta in North America but they are still being built in the EU AFAIK. Major car markets product their domestic auto industry anyways so you're probably going to have to setup local production in any case.
The surviving vehicle(s) on the platform are the Ford Puma and Puma Gen-E, which are subcompact crossovers not sold in North America.
American brands were considered prestigious as I understand it.
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Tesla is a US company?
I can continue to milk a specific market while my competitors do other things.
Yeah eventually that will be dried up, but by than point enough wealth has been accumulated for generations of me and my family.
Plus if the worst comes too quickly there’s a fair chance I’ll get bailed out by my long time buddies in the government.
Domestic sources of cheap, plentiful energy helped the US economy grow beyond expectations over the past decade, but it might prove to be a short-term boon that leads to long-term issues if the rest of the world's economy pivots away from fossil fuels.
City gas was actually the first industry that proved the more you make, the more people demand. If we make more power, we will use it.
Then consider that AI datacenters as big as NYC will need as much power as possible.
A glut in supply drives prices down. Oil extraction and refining doesn't have constant costs, as it is heavily dependent on geography as well as the physical characteristics of oil itself.
This is why there was a 3 way gas price war between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in the 2010s.
Not really they can sell gas to anyone else. One cannot simply ship natural gas overseas. LNG is a thing, but export facilities have limited capacity.
The article seems to leave this important detail out, despite talking a lot about China
0. https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
EDIT: it looks like the article does mention it, I just missed it:
> The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024
Meanwhile the US is full of hubris and can't see beyond their own nose.
Sigh, without the Brooks Brothers "riot", the guy people insulted for talking about climate change would've been president...
The full solar supply chain is currently being produced in the US, with low capacity but more planned.
SEIA has a solar and storage supply chain dashboard that they update with operational and planned capacities.
But clearly recent moves by the current admin are undercutting this progress.
Because that (in Rotterdam) is the normal for central Europe these days. Except that they're already in a warehouse/container pile after their ocean voyage.
China shoveled billions into developing solar manufacturing technologies, and as a result they figure out how to cheaply mass-produce solar cells. Solyndra failed because they couldn't compete against the resulting cheap solar cells.
You're measuring success only in with regards to how it might benefit you as a foreigner, but dosen't necessarily mean it was wholly successful for the China.
"South Korea files WTO complaint over US solar tariffs"
https://www.pv-tech.org/south-korea-challenging-us-solar-tar...
"US DOC issues steep AD/CVD tariffs on Southeast Asian solar cells"
https://www.pv-tech.org/us-doc-issues-ad-cvd-tariffs-on-sout...
The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs against solar cell imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia.
"A Casualty of Trump’s Tariffs: India’s Nascent Solar Industry"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/india-solar-panel...
"Solar products from Mexico and Canada slapped with tariffs for first time"
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/02/solar-products...
I don’t doubt that another benefit is the current admin just simply doesn’t like solar of course
Animal vets, plumbers, HVAC, and other industries too.
How much it costs to sell a house. Then tell him in that in the US it's 6% of the sales price.
How much it costs to install solar and heat pumps.
Personally I like the idea of an electric car doubling as a house battery but so far I think only the F-150 lightning is capable of doing that.
In general yes, grid solar + grid batteries are cheaper than any peaking power plants. So now 24/7 batteries + wind + solar generally outcompetes nuclear, coal, or natural gas on price as long as there’s no tariffs involved.
This isn’t enough to make batteries + solar viable in Alaska but long distance transmission lines could solve that issue cost effectively.
Getting solar panels forces you onto a plan in which they charge more per kwh pulled from the grid. The surplus electricity is only credited at the generation cost which is only 1/4 the total cost per kwh. (Delivery costs is 3x the price of electricity).
So if you want to go solar to save money you need both batteries and solar panels which is not an insignificant amount of money.
We will run with 100% renewables for years, and there will still be people asking if storage has been solved already. We will just solve every large issue, and suffer lots of small issues.
Also, if you are using your car as a battery, you can't use it as a car. It's more likely that you will have extra batteries at home so that you can charge your car when you want.
No, but it's cheaper than it ever was and panels are so cheap that they can have ROI even without storage. That said, grid solar makes the most financial sense if you're not in an off-grid location.
The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.
Maybe just force grid-connected solar installations that want credit (any size) and even those that just want to be grid-tied (beyond some small size like maybe 5 panels/2kW worth of MPPT) to use a registering meter that meters net energy for each like 15 min interval (that's the granularity we use in central Europe; I assume the US would have come to a similar choice of granularity), and bills energy according to market rate and appropriately handles connection capacity/transformer capex by like taking a histogram of those individual measurements or otherwise letting a few isolated bursts through while ensuring transformer capacity is paid for by those responsible for the (hypothetical, until it's not) transformer upgrade.
I'm pretty sure PG&E pays back something like only 5% of the generation of my solar panels. I'll end the year with $400 more generated than used, and I'll get a check for $20...
If it wasn’t, parts of the country wouldn’t be invested in adding it.
Recent discussion on HN on a similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706527
The way you worded this implies that you disagree. Are you aware of why wholesale prices aren't constant?
Like solar panels, also tariffed.
Thinking of national policy from a home owner perspective is expected, but it isn't always instructive.
For the latter item, my Rivian has a relatively paltry 1500W inverter with standard 110W plugs in the back seat, truck bed, and gear tunnel, but I can use a rectifier/power supply to pull a constant 1kW, step that back to DC and feed it into my home's battery backup system. My whole house tends to use ~2kW at peak, and obviously can conserve in outages. So I get my normal 4kWh battery bank with solar hookups, but can splice the 141kWh Rivian battery in, too, for a good chunk of off-grid power.
It really does feel like the US is completely hosed when it comes to energy (and thus, industrial relevance broadly). Every 4 years we make a bigger bet in the opposite direction of the last, and meanwhile the entire world moves on without us. At least now it feels like no matter what the US does we'll make progress on climate goals as a species, even if in 50 years the US is still building coal plants and criminalizing home solar.