Is it, though? Solar/wind is the path to getting us off fossil fuel. (I'm ignoring nuclear, as it has not managed to take off outside France, and the pro-nuclea

Is it, though? Solar/wind is the path to getting us off fossil fuel. (I'm ignoring nuclear, as it has not managed to take off outside France, and the pro-nuclear contingent is so full of wishful thinking and conspiracy theory that it's like nails on chalkboard to listen to them.) Early production credits are just priming the pump for solar/wind, helping the lead time to get the market going. They're neither necessary nor viable in the long run. Nor are they reliable for long-term utility commitments - all it takes is a political wave of fossil industry shills and anti-environmentalist fanatics (like, say, Washington today), and all those long-fought subsidies and credits can disappear. Worse, such subsidy/credit models are notoriously difficult to target effectively - the Obama administration, for all their good intentions, completely botched it. But regulation and subsidy are, themselves, just market forces, more conditions to set supply and demand and therefore price. I don't believe in bullshit fantasies about frictionless free markets, and to the extent that they do exist, they just drive profit margins to near-zero (see the margins for supermarkets or gas stations). Show a real capitalist a regulation, and she'll see a market opportunity to be exploited. That's how capitalism actually works outside the whiteboard. The killer for nuclear isn't regulation or subsidy - it's latency. Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build (not because of regulation, but because of complexity and scale). This introduces much greater long-term financial risk, and the industry is full of failed boondoggles, not just in the US but everywhere. Solar and wind, on the other hand, can be experimented with at a small scale, for very low cost, and lead times an order of magnitude less than nuclear. What we're seeing now is a scaling up of the initial experimentation, based on initial learnings. In software terms, solar/wind allow for Lean product development. Nuclear is waterfall in its purest form. Which one gets us to viable products faster and more reliably?