Renewable Energy in the USA: Stupid is as Stupid Does
“The days of stupidity” are alive and well in the USA after the Department of the Interior cancelled a Nevada solar farm slated to become the world’s largest. The 185-square-mile, 6.2-GW Esmeralda 7 solar and battery storage installation would have powered almost two million homes, but was unceremoniously dumped according to President Donald Trump’s wishes as indicated in his typical Truth Social style. Not only is Trump’s post full of lies about energy costs, such policy is casting a dark shadow over the economic future of the USA.
In the early 1980s, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory director Roland Hulstrom calculated that a 10,000 square-mile photovoltaic (PV) solar farm could power the entire US grid. Spread across existing rooftops – factories, warehouses, parking lots, and over 100 million American homes – the impact would be marginal. Colorado School of Mines professor John Fanchi made a similar calculation in 2004 for wind power: 12.7 million 4-MW turbines spread over 50,700 1-GW farms could power the entire globe.
A 2008 Scientific American cover story, “A Grand Plan for Solar Energy,” outlined how the US could free itself from foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 using solar power: “The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year.”
In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, “Solar Panels for Every Home,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted that solar panel prices had dropped 80% in five years and could generate electricity at or below grid prices in 20 states, succinctly stating “We have the technology. The economics make sense. All we need is the political will.” Today, solar power provides unmatched cheap electricity across 50 states.
So what happened? Slow to ramp up as in the short-tail of any revolution, solar is now the world’s fastest growing energy sector, providing a record 600 GW or 70% of new energy capacity across the globe in 2024. Why turn the lights off of a successful made-in-America technology first demonstrated as a 6%-efficient “solar energy battery” in 1954 at Bell Labs? By 2030, more than half of all electrical power will come from the sun.
Money is the obvious reason as in Big Oil’s stranglehold on a petroleum-run world that gobbles up over 80 million barrels per day, subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars a year. No surprise natural gas exports permits were fast-tracked, offshore oil-drilling leases increased, and electric-vehicle tax credits axed soon after Trump’s 2024 inauguration. No surprise he constantly derides the green competition.
Presumed “creeping socialism” is another reason. If consumers can power their own homes and cars, who needs to buy oil? Home solar for all means a loss of top-down utility control as “prosumers” buy and sell to each other, borrowing electrons from neighbours as easily as a cup of sugar with savings downloaded directly via phone app.
China’s dominance is also a concern, now the number-one manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles as well the supplier of rare-earth metals needed in today’s magnet-powered motors. Included in the transition to renewables is a growing transfer of political power from West to East.
Today, energy generation costs are cheapest for onshore wind at $37/MWh followed by utility PV at $38/MWh, while nuclear power is almost four times as expensive. Coal power has become so unprofitable that a bid to buy 167 million tons of coal at under 1 cent/ton was rejected.
Integrated battery energy storage systems to reduce the “dark doldrums” (down-sun time and wind lull) are also on the rise, while “intermittency firming” is improving. Expanded microgrids, home storage, and virtual power plants are also a threat to American dominance and the entire oil-run economy. The real scam is lying about a growing green economy, raising energy prices, and discouraging investment.
Nor is solar destroying farmers. Just the opposite as solar and wind provide farmers with a guaranteed income (“double cropping” or “agrivoltaics”) in the always uncertain agricultural sector, made more uncertain by tariff-driven losses as US silos remain full of unsold produce.
The US is losing economic advantage with each cancelled project, including 223 previously awarded projects valued at over $7.5 billion. As America turns its back on progress, China is building the world’s largest solar farm, a 15-GW PV installation in the Tibetan Plateau, while India is on track to reach 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030. The 3.6-GW Dogger Bank Wind Farm in the North Sea will be the world’s largest upon completion in 2027, powering “the equivalent of six million homes in the UK,” while France is building the largest offshore wind farm, a 1.5-GW installation 40 km off the Normandy coast.
Is it worry over change, NIMBYism, or something as simple as the wrath of Donald Trump after planning authorities declined to stop a wind farm near one of his loss-making Scottish golf courses? Or a modern-day Don Quixote railing against non-existent giant adversaries in a fit of anti-science madness?
Stupidity has a formidable American pedigree, from circus showman P.T. Barnum’s “There’s a sucker born every minute” to author and social critic H.L. Mencken’s “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer.” George Orwell also didn’t see much intelligence in the “governing classes” as he wrote about belching chimneys, stinking slums, and organized poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier, his scathing exposé on the ugliness of industrialization in the coalfields of northern England. Orwell also warned about the folly of starting a civil war amid rising authoritarianism, tyranny, and misinformation.
As with any maturing technology, there are challenges ahead, such as improving grid resilience, interconnectivity, and security, same as in the time of the early electrical pioneers Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Samuel Insull, when less than 1% of the American population was grid-tied.
Who could imagine 130 years after the first electrons were sent 22 miles from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, a US president would try to stop the sun from shining and the wind from blowing? You might as well proclaim gravity a lie.
We should be stopping planet-destroying global warming, armed conflict, and cyber attacks, not hindering the roll-out of a proven clean, green, and sustainable energy technology. Stupid is as stupid does.
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