If economic feasibility is based on government incentives (unsustainable) for solar, and perhaps electric cars, is the big green transition that is currently being pushed ever going to be sustainable?
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...
But what's the long game here? EVs have dropped in price by a factor of ~3 and solar power dropped in cost by a factor of 10 over the past decade. The incentives seem to be achieving exactly what they sought to achieve.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/solar-pv-has-be...
So even in a world where all incentives were removed, it seems oil, coal, and gas are organically on the way out. What's holding that back, as usual, is $$$ people. And it's fascinating that California not only wants to all but discontinue paying for electricity from rooftop solar panels, but plans to go even further and impose a $96/year de facto tax per kW of solar panel installed.
https://nrgcleanpower.com/learning-center/nem-what-changes-a...
I think our leaders have no idea what they're doing across the board personally.
But even distributed solar has a positive ROI, it’s just a long pay off period (20 years etc) without government incentives. But there are plenty of investments out there with lower ROI and longer payoffs that people still invest in.
So it’s all economically feasible and has been for almost a decade (which is why we’re seeing so much solar and wind deployment at the moment). Government incentives just accelerate a trend that was going to happen regardless.
If you personally want to invest in solar, then you should look for cooperatives that are raising funds to build solar farms and put some capital in.
But your utility provider should have nothing to do with this, they just provide the cables and buy energy to resell to you (exactly what they're responsible changes region to region, in some parts of the world they just buy and resell energy, and others maintain the cables). Expecting them to build solar would be like expecting your supermarket to manufacture every item on their shelves. They may manufacture some products because it makes sense for them to do so, but the majority are made by others.
If our society requires more energy than is sustainable regardless of source, we need to construct societies that use less energy.
So let’s think about transportation. It’s not about switching from ICE to electric cars, but from private cars and suburbs to mass transit and dense cities.
Government is subsidizing unsustainable energy consumption rather than transforming society to lower consumption.
They could certainly also subsidize shifts away from energy use in general, but these things aren't mutually exclusive and we probably can't actually get to carbon negative so long as we're burning fossil fuels, which is what we actually need to do.