We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Those who are most able to pay for it are those who are paying for the highest initial costs, lowering the costs for everyone else by improvements in the technology, and making it easier for others to adopt later. Early adopters take lots of risk on things not working out well, and learning what things can go wrong and how to fix them (at additional expense, too.)
This is much better than those who are least able to pay being made to shoulder the cost and risks of being early adopters.
That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH.
1) TFA, with manufacturers using their limited production capacity to target the highest margin customers, the ones that overpay the most.
2) green energy subsidies, in the comment I'm replying to.
In the first case, the price insensitive customers are the ones paying for a build out of capacity, and taking on greater risk while doing it.
But in the comment that I'm replying to, the poster was commenting on "benefits" which is presumably the lower cost of electricity, and those with the least also have the greatest need for lower costs. Presumably this is about residential solar/storage, or at least I interpreted it to be. Lower costs in solar are not having much of an impact at the moment due to the high cost of the regulatory structure that we use in the US; Australia has a far far far lower solar installation cost, <5x per Watt. If there's disparity in the availability of our overpriced residential solar, it's due to those with less generally being renters rather than owners. So their landlord makes the decision about residential solar versus grid electricity.
And for green energy subsidies on utility solar/storage, the question gets even more complicated because falling electricity generation costs are not something that the utility wants to pass on, since most in the US are regulated monopolies and have no incentive to ever lower prices.
In any case, the existence of the subsidy is not the core problem, it's the mismatch between decision makers and beneficiaries.
That money that subsidizes purchases of more expensive products also incentivizes all those factories, the things that make them cheaper in the future.
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH
If you can convert this vague statement into a policy with real impacts, there would be tons of people that would love to hear it. Otherwise, it's just wishing the world were different, without a path to completion.
Should we all have free energy? Of course! But how do we do it. I'm all ears and hope that you have come up with a defensible policy. (Though ideally you should have shared it 4 years ago, because it's going to be a long time before we have another shot at setting policy, and everybody was begging for ideas like yours back then.)
It kinda was, it's just that it was spend in China and the US government got the money back by putting tariffs on the imports.
The tariffs are paid by the importer, whose customers also gets a government subsidy paid for by the tariffs that the electorate is told are paid by the exporter, so they get to feel like they're getting a good deal and the voters get to feel patriotic, and why isn't my MSCI China investment doing better…