So first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popular

So first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popularized solar-as-a-service PPA's (SunEdison pays the upfront capital costs to install solar on your roof and you pay it back by paying them for the electricity you consume at lower prices than the utility but still high enough to pay back with margins). Today he runs a big cleantech investment firm. But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example. A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-sources-account-for-most-new-u-s-power-capacity/#6d92a86e5971 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so... This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country. This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...) Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.