I don't think I agree with this as it suggests they are doing it because they can't be bothered about it. Instead, they are doing it specifically because their (and/or their friend's) pockets are getting filled. To me, the latter is much more sinister.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001
Lyft is 10% of the size of big coal and Amazon is over 20x larger.
American empire ruled with the petrodollar. Chinese will rule with the solaryuan if we don't get our shit together.
The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.
Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.
If the average panel lifetime is 25 years, and it takes > 25 years to reach "full capacity" (whatever that might mean or whatever level that is at), then by definition there will be a continuous cycle of panel replacement taking place.
It's not as if we get all the PV installed in 12 months and then it lasts for 25 years ...
It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.
But the growth rate has been huge for as long as records have been kept, and was a factor of just over 10x between 2014 and 2024, speeding up more recently.
PV and wind together are likely to start breaking the electricity market severely in the first half of the 2030s; I hope, but it's not certain yet, that ongoing battery expansion will allow the demand for electricity to increase and this can continue to the end of the 2030s, because at the current pace of development those scale up to all our energy needs, not merely our present electrical needs, in a bit less than 20 years from now. (PV alone would do all of it in 20 years at present rate of change).
Call it 10% of the Sahara.
Bear in mind that if we go all-electric, raw energy consumption falls significantly, many panels will be sited on buildings, solar isn't the only renewable, and solar farms aren't ecological deserts - you can graze animals below them.
Honestly, seems like a good trade to me.
No we won't. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted the entire planet to solar today, there would still be new installations tomorrow because energy demand is infinite. There's never enough, we've always used more energy as more energy sources were available.
Funny you would say that, Australia is about to have free power for all for a few hours each day. Yep, there really is that much
https://www.energy.gov.au/news/solar-sharer-offer-cut-electr...
Like the internet today, electricity could have been a flat monthly fee determined by your service line limit (similar to bandwidth) with limits in place for excess use.
Why pay the enormous maintenance cost for a continental scale grid when you can in your neighborhood have a small local grid with solar, wind and storage followed by a tiny diesel/gas turbine ensuring reliability through firming.
When deemed necessary decarbonize the firming by running it on carbon neutral fuels.
The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.
I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.
This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)
the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.
https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/...
Not only did solar and wind provide the vast majority of power during the day today, as I write this comment coal is neck-and-neck with storage as an energy resource - i.e. power that was saved during the day because it was so sunny.
Coal simply makes no economic sense as a power source for electricity generation anymore. Natural gas is still needed as base load for when renewables are insufficient, but in perhaps the "free market ideological capital" of Texas, the trend towards renewables + storage is simply the economic choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
California's percentage of solar generation as a share of the entire solar generation in the USA has shrunk every year since 2016.
It's not been accurate to say that California is dragging the rest of the country with them for a long time when it comes to energy generation.
Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.
1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/02/2...
Subsidies can certainly delay things at this point, but it's hard to see how it'd stop it.
If silver stays above $70/oz, prices will likely go up by 5-10%.
Until Perovskite tandem technology matures, there's unlikely to be any significant reduction in PV module prices.
https://finance-commerce.com/2026/02/solar-panels-silver-to-...
The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.
I mean it doesn't really matter, does it? Even with 200% tariffs solar panels will still be cheapest. The entire global supply chain will move towards electrification.
The only question is whether we will be left behind or not.
The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.