[towaway15463]

If small commercial solar operations are in fact cheap and have a high return then why am I not seeing startup solar power generation companies everywhere? Surely it would be a hot industry to get into if you can put it anywhere and make a profit?

[epistasis]

I would suggest that those companies exist everywhere, you just don't see them. There's something like 1 TW of renewable projects that are being considered in US interconnection queues right now. Total US power draw is only 0.5TW. At and average of ~30% capacity factor, that's 60% of total US electricity demand replacement, with today's projects.

Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marginal best investment dollar gets the invested, but the scale is there.

Really the limit it current solar and wind production capacity, which is ever increasing at absolutely terrific speeds.

This is one of many reasons that I think a focus on nuclear is the wrong place. It's not going to be able to scale to catch up to these other technologies, even if after 60 years of development, nuclear finds a learning curve for the first time ever.

[towaway15463]

I’m aware of several heavily subsidized renewable projects in my local area alone that have failed to deliver usable power to a grid that sorely needs it. I’m aware of 0 independently funded ventures even though my area has some of the highest electricity prices in the country.

My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installations and cutting deals with municipalities to provide some of their grid power?

That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet. Promises of future developments do nothing to address current needs. I have a feeling that 100% renewable generation is fast becoming a “20 years away” problem since I’ve been hearing the same promises for at least 20 years now and those older than me likely remember even older promises.

[epistasis]

> That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet.

I don't know where you live, but generalizing from one small locality with an out of wack market is leading you to the wrong conclusions.

In places where there's a free market for new generation, like Texas, there's more GW of storage being added than GW of natural gas. There's an order of magnitude of new wind and solar generation being added than natural gas, and this is the place with some of the cheapest natural gas in the entire world. Having trouble finding ERCOT, but for the entire US, 1.3TW of the 1.4TW on newly proposed projects are renewable or storage:

https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...

So your local utility, which is charging you high prices, probably has a process that disincentivizes renewables to a large degree. And if there are zero independent funded ventures, then your utility must be actively stopping renewables, and those investors are working in the far more fertile rest of the US.

In particular, small projects can be the hardest to get through. There's zero reason for a utility to cut a deal, they are a monopoly, they are raking in far checks by doing nothing. Utility executives are some of the people least likely to adopt any sort of new technology.

The biggest impediment to renewables sweeping through the grid and giving us cheaper electricity is politics, conservatives, and rentierism. In areas where there's a market set up to allow lower costs to win, fossil fuels are toast. But in most places, electricity is not a market.

[pfdietz]

Replacing existing operating power plants is tougher than outcompeting other options for new power plants. Demand for grid energy in the US has been flat for more than a decade.