All great questions.

When I look at the "Worldwide growth of photovoltaics" plot at the top of the page you linked, I see the "Green" (European) color dominate from 2008-2013 (maybe 80%+ of installs). Germany purchases, peaking in 2011, where in the heart of when solar price declines occurred. By the same chart, deployments in the rest of the world explode post 2014, after the big price declines.

Here's an article from 2011 (concurrent with German deployments) showing the immense price falls at that time: https://rameznaam.com/2011/03/17/expis-moores-law-really-a-f...

Yes, there's a huge 'chicken' v 'egg' question here: deployment vs. price declines from tech learning rates. Someone had to kick-start this process by for huge deployments when it was uneconomical, to then drive scaling in production. Germany footed the bill. Global deployments then soured after those purchases and price declines.

Perhaps someone else would have done this later, but I don't really care about the historical counterfactual, I care about who's balance sheet the uneconomic debt, to kickstart the virtuous cycle, sits on. So I credit Germany.

Yes, I am attributing a success to the Energiewende that was not part of the initial plan. But I do think it's an important success. Here's reference: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-4-energiewende/

My understanding of the Energiewende, is that it was never focused on climate. Rather is was a plan to create economic energy independence at a time of very high and rising oil prices (e.g. 2008-2014).

So from 2020, the plan looks like a failure b/c 1) the twin tech. breakthroughs of low priced renewables and fracking have "slayed" the monster of rising high hydrocarbon prices 2) we now view climate change as a far bigger issue. If energy prices had stayed high, I think we'd view the Energiewende as achieving it's stated goals. The situation has changed.

Though, I'll be the first person to say the CO2 goals of the energy transition are more important than what the Energiewende focused on.

I'm not sure that graph contradicts OP's narrative. It clearly shows European PV capacity rapidly growing from almost nothing to near-present levels from 2006 to 2012, with the rest of the world accounting for only a tiny fraction. This corresponds to a time period when solar prices dropped dramatically: https://samsetproject.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fall-in-so...

Then, once PV prices were cheap, the rest of the world bought a ton of cheap PV capacity.

Now, this doesn't prove that the reduction in price was caused by European PV spending, but the data certainly is strongly compatible with that claim.

Germany started in the year 2000 with guaranteed, high prices to providers of solar/wind energy and that their feeding into the electrical grid has preference over other providers. Additionally they employed grants for citizens deploying solar on their roofs.

That massively raised the electricity prices, resulting in the world's costliest electricity.

Around 24% (!) of the German electricity price is a Renewable Surcharge[1]. With a >$350 billion/year power industry revenue it is easy to see that Germany's contribution to kickstart large scale solar and wind power generation can hardly be overstated.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_German...

Apparently the first German law was introduced in 2000 [0]. I see the argument that is made, Germany pushing the sector and I remember a lot of folks investing into solar in the 2000s.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Sour...

PG&E practices the time honored tradition of stochastic terrorism through incompetence (avoiding maintenance commitments) and regulatory capture (to avoid the penalties).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/18/business/pge-...

Look at PG&E's recent accident and incident record.

As a German, I don't consider this a failure. Yes, it was expensive, and probably it was more expensive than it needed to because execution wasn't perfect, but this year up today, Germany has produced 51% of the electricity via renewable sources. And of course Germany gets the same cost savings as anyone else when moving further forward with renewables. Also the guaranteed high prices for solar and wind from the early years are currently slowly running out, so currently those costs are falling quickly and the true cost saving of more renewables will be effective in the electricity prices in Germany.

"everyone else who tries it will do better because Germans ate the costs?"

Yes on both your points. Sadly, German industry didn't get the benefit. Which makes it harder to convince the country to do stuff like this again.

Very different from Tesla, where a bunch of silicon valley people ate the cost (e.g. VCs, roadster, 2012 model-S) and then many benefitted as they own stock.

Yes, "inadvertent terrorist" would normally be a contradiction in terms, as 'terrorism is the act of killing innocent people to spread terror and extort a body politic to make a political change'. So this can't be inadvertent.

Yet, PG&E 1) kills innocent people 2) demands more money from the population it kills 3) is unable to stop killing people 4) covers up their malfeasance in court 5) repeatedly sets my state on fire.

Agreed that PG&E is "responsible for multiple lethal felonies."

But, in your comment, I'll note you only identified the problem instead of proposed a solution! So what English language phrase do you suggest to describe the above behavior?

Does 'Functionally equivalent to a violent Mafioso organization that doesn't actually want to kill but does wants all your money and can't stop killing you?' satisfy your standards for the use of the English language? I reserve the right to be hyperbolic in my frustration as long as PG&E keeps this up.

Politely, I ask you to resolve the problem you identified. As by the use of the word 'inadvertent', I demonstrated that I know the definition in my initial comment :)

Finally, does "Substantially more evil than Comcast" work here?

What’s that plan look like?