Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.
Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.
Texas surpassed California in terms of utility-scale solar because California both uses less electricity and has been so successful with distributed (customer premises) solar between the old incentives (now phased out) and its newer construction mandates that there is basically no energy demand for new utility solar to fill, because solar generation already peaks at above 100% of demand much of time, the utility demand is for storage and/or generation that is not on the same cycle as solar.
Texas has less total solar generation capacity than California, and gets much less of its total electricity from solar.
I don't mean to get personal but this is a really ill-informed opinion. Texas has to deal with hurricanes and legitimate weather events, CA has invented problems that cause blackouts at the expense of CA taxpayers; meanwhile CA pays 2-3x for the same power. It's really not a good comparison, CA has a famously mismanaged electric grid
How many people died in the last major California outage? Didn't Texas have people freezing to death? I know what I'd rather deal with.
In 2024, there were no deaths due to power outages in CA or in TX.
That said, comparing natural disaster deaths is a stupid way to measure the success or failure of a power grid. Success should be determined by factors like uptime or cost.
Why don't you look up the uptime and cost of the Texas grid vs the CA grid in 2024?
how?