[roenxi]

> Renewable energies are cheap (they are basically "free"). Deploying them is expensive.

That just sounds like a half-truth, otherwise people wouldn't always be so impassioned about subsidising renewable. They'd jest buy land and build honking great renewable plants.

Now the situation may have changed in the last decade or so, because the growth in renewables is very real. But it takes no political will to deploy cheap energy. There would be queues of bankers trying to invest if they thought they could undercut market producers and make good returns. Every greedy person on the planet (so somewhere in the region of 8 billion of them) would be happy to get in on the deal.

[adrianN]

You can't just buy land and build wind turbines and solar panels. You need expensive permits and then spend a couple of years in court battling various citizen groups who don't like renewables anywhere near their homes. You can't even put solar panels on the roof of an apartment building and then sell the power to the tenants, regulation prevents it.

[cesarb]

> You can't even put solar panels on the roof of an apartment building and then sell the power to the tenants, regulation prevents it.

At least in my country, AFAIK regulation explicitly allows for something like that: there's a net metering modality in which a group of consumers (for instance, a condominium) can split the credits from the net metering of a shared solar power plant. It's meant for precisely that scenario (power panels on the roof of an apartment building, each apartment has its own independent meter).

[adrianN]

Awesome. I hope Germany fixes the legislation around solar too.

[roenxi]

Coal mines and power plants face the same challenges. They manage, somehow.

[formerly_proven]

They manage because politics pushes these things through while creating new regulations for renewables.

E.g. in Germany one of the chancellor candidates was state MP and personally & illegally forced expansion of coal strip mining while enacting new rules making wind power essentially impossible in his state.

[adrianN]

They manage mostly by being older than these regulations.