What's really behind improvements in solar and wind efficiency? R&D work. It doesn't matter who pays the bills if the goal is greater efficiency and incentives

What's really behind improvements in solar and wind efficiency? R&D work. It doesn't matter who pays the bills if the goal is greater efficiency and incentives are aligned to reward it. That capitalism rewards power generation efficiency is more of a side-effect than a feature. If it was more profitable to improve energy extraction then the R&D funding would go there instead. It can be strongly argued that this literally happened; we got fracking before we got cheap wind power, despite the technology for efficient wind being available for decades (quibbling about computer modeling acknowledged), and we still flare methane from oil wells instead of capturing it. That capitalism rewarded clean energy efficiency instead of, say, dirty risky cheap nuclear fission efficiency is entirely due to regulation.