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#7 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-05-09 12:01 AM
If solar power has resulted in a [transitory] period of negative power cost, why does Pres Trump seem to be so against solar power?

Because he is the same kind of dumbass who lives in the past and as incapable of processing or remembering new information as the people who think that if solar (or wind) power generation resulted in a short [transitory] period of [theoretical and 'unsold'] "negative" power cost due to "surge," it means that solar power is cheap and is the "solution" to energy needs everywhere, because it's also "clean and renewable" and is also the answer to AGW / climate change.

First, just adding a new installation, however small it is, will create a new "record" of that type of energy. So the headline "records" of generation some place are meaningless.

It's like "stable genius" telling people that "beautiful tariffs" will generate Trillions of dollars and would replace income tax.

Or banning gas appliances, mandating "electrification" of transportation / cars without building electric capacity to handle new demand, then finding out that renewables will take huge land "footprint", be more TCO-expensive and still won't provide anywhere near enough power to accomplish it. Then restarting old nuclear plant that was supposed to be scrapped to prevent brownouts. Look at California, Germany, UK... which went all-in on renewables.

Or California deciding to build a "train from nowhere to nowhere" because Japan, China, Europe have efficient high-speed light-rail systems.

"Why can't we do that?" should be replaced by "Why do we need that?"... and "because climate change" is not the answer - e.g., world's renewable energy capacity increased substantially in the last 25 years... but climate change has gone unabated.

In the EU they reclassified NG as a "green" energy, to meet their self-imposed "green" goals. Recently they lowered barriers to methane.

BTW, USA is already producing 11% of world electricity from renewables; China is #1 at 32%, Brazil - 7%, Canada and India - 4.5%.

We've been through this here a couple of years ago, when someone kept posting about "record power generation" from "renewables" in CA. Not surprisingly, it also caused much higher usage of natgas for a backup, since wind and solar are INTERMITTENT and batteries which are toxic, degrade within relatively short amount of time and take humongous amount of space, require much higher maintenance and (at least, in the US) are not even close to TCO-competitive as e.g., NG alone - IOW, these intermittent solutions have a huge "FOOTPRINT" and very low ENERGY DENSITY.

Many US solar and wind companies went out of business long before most state and federal incentives expired because promised cost savings didn't materialize.

Just because few small countries like Costa Rica and Nepal are 90%-100% reliant on renewables for electricity (not a lot of "heavy manufacturing" and datacenters in those countries) no "one size fits all" energy solutions exist.

CA is #1 in solar (but buys wind power from as far as WY), TX is #1 in wind and #2 in solar.

So why is CA electricity so much higher when most of it is from renewables?

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Wind, solar, and storage free us from fossil-fueled wars and price spikes. Renewable energy = energy independence.

We don't have a problem with "energy independence" - the US is net exporter of oil, gas and coal.

The real problems with renewable energy are "large footprint | low density" and costs, because the "energy" is a global market.

Because the worldwide demand for energy grows along with all the "records" of growing supply of energy from renewables, 80+% of the world's energy is still generated by oil, coal, NG (32%, 27%, 24%) with hydro (6%) and nuclear (5%).

What we do need is energy diversification - but that's exactly opposite of mandating "energy uniformity" of electricity and the renewables, again in the name of "fighting" climate change. Mandates only give you dependence on one source of energy and you lose both diversification and cost competition.

With non-portable electricity, the demand centers should be matched with the close-by types of resource center areas, but that's not what some states' or federal government's "one size fits all" mandates deliver.

The real myth is the panacea of trying to "save the planet" with renewables and "EVs everywhere" which crowded out more efficient long-term energy generation.