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the sad thing about this data is how politicized clean energy has become. the blue states have a lot of energy solar - while the red ones are sparse. the red o

• rapind 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • FrustratedMonky 1y ago
    What is the argument against it? I've never heard any logical reasons beyond hating the Left. It's like hating bikers, why? The same people that have pickup trucks and swerve to intimidate bikers, seem to hate solar energy. But why?
    • rapind 1y ago
      Rhetoric mostly I'd say. The idea being promoted is that clean energy subsidies hurt the honest Joe coal miner (details being very hand wavy). I'm not convinced it's really that well thought out though and might just be about owning the libs. Maybe there's a MAGA in here that can educate us.
    • bluGill 1y ago
      Because anything one side says the other must automatically and reflexively oppose no matter what. The example here is Right hating on Left, but the Left as the same illogical hate against the right - though in different areas. This has often been blamed on first past the post voting - if you want to win you have to team up which means your views on Abortion and Environment Policy have to align even though there is no reason to think the two should have anything to do with one another. Since there is no room for thinking each side is correct one one and wrong on the other you have to oppose anything the other does without wondering if maybe they are correct. Now remember that are thousands (millions?) of different issues, and many of them have a range of different answers, yet there can only be one unified position that you support... I'm not convinced that the various alternatives are really better though. They all seem to have issues in the real world, and too often people will look at what they have an ignore the issues because they want to feel better.
      • pstuart 1y ago
        > the Left as the same illogical hate against the right Challenge accepted. Receipts please.
        • southernplaces7 1y ago
          Firearms for home and personal defense. Also, not to even dig deeply into the many lunacies that the progressive left became insane about during the pandemic (both sides were guilty here, but it was BOTH sides). Don't get too smug. You really think your entire half of a political spectrum is free of stupidity and irrational thinking?
          • rapind 1y ago
            > Firearms for home and personal defense. Given the current political climate, the left should definitely get on board with this one ASAP. There's lunacy on both sides for sure, but MAGA has a pretty strong hold on blatant cruelty when it comes to their issues. Also, I'd argue the Overton window has shifted pretty far right, so you have to be pretty extreme to be considered a right wing extremist these days. In fact, some of the major MAGA rallying points could actually be points of compromise to most progressives if they weren't so cruel about it (ICE, farm slavery visas, trans sports). Plus curiously the one we could all agree on but don't hear much about on the right anymore; Epstein.
          • adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
            being against the #1 killer of children in the US hardly seems insane to me.
          • blacksmith_tb 1y ago
            Oh sure, the Left has plenty of irrational but deeply held beliefs. Anti-firearms though... when they kill more people through suicide than homicide... 1: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/new-report-highlights-us-2023-gun-deaths-suicide-by-firearm-at-record-levels-for-third-straight-year https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/new-report-highlights-us-2...
          • 1y ago
    • mantas 1y ago
      Technically I could see some reasons. Grids need serious upgrades to support personal solar properly. Which is €€€ and, if end-customers would have to foot the bill themselves, very few people would install solar at home. On top of that, at least in my whereabouts solar is receives a fuckton of subsidies. In the long run lower energy prices will pay back those subsidies for the society, but for now I could see why some people ain't happy to foot the bill. Especially when it's usually better-off people installing solar. While poor people end up partially footing the bool. Last but not least, Chinese domination in modern solar equipment is mind-boggling. At least when I was installing solar, buying western-made would have been much more expensive, to the point that it wouldn't be worth to go through. P.S. I got solar on the roof myself. „Free“ electricity is damn nice.
      • FrustratedMonky 1y ago
        Isn't US made equipment facing the headwinds of the US being anti-solar. It seems more like the US shot itself in the foot by letting the Chinese get the lead on this technology. And by subsidizing, and maybe regulating buying US, we could support our domestic industry. Seems like all over the place we are giving up and letting China win the technology race. Robots, cars, solar, all the future tech is in trouble. I don't know why anybody is against clean air. It makes no sense.
        • mantas 1y ago
          As an euro, here it's the same. Even though (most of?) europe is pro-solar.
        • adabyron 1y ago
          The US has invested a lot of money, lives, political capital & environment to become a big oil & gas producer. One of it's potential weapons against China is that China imports most of it's oil & gas. China also has a few easy geographical choke points to prevent it from importing gas. Solar & wind plus electrical vehicles destroy this advantage. So China has many reasons to push in this direction while the US is doubling down on it's bet, even while other historical oil countries like Saudi Arabia are diversifying away from oil. It should also be noted that many Chinese companies are selling at a loss or very low margin, especially the electric car companies. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-world-beating-auto-industry-into-tailspin-2025-09-17/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-...
    • jtr1 1y ago
      I think you'll have a difficult time comprehending the phenomenon if you look for reasoned arguments. A much more productive framework, IMO, is to see it in terms of a feedback loop between funding sources and the aggregate valence of speech on a particular topic. The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.
    • pjc50 1y ago
      It acknowledges the reality of global warming. Furthermore, and the real reason why it's considered "woke", is that it implies taking some action to reduce the harm done to others. People who enjoy threatening to harm others (such as your biker example) get very angry about that.
      • blacksmith_tb 1y ago
        I think guilt plays in also, a sizable fraction of the population don't want to hear that the way they live their lives is damaging everyone (even themselves, poignantly enough). To try and put that in a more sympathetic light, they don't want to hear they need to invest a significant chunk of their income in reducing that harm (like improving the efficiency of their home, installing PV, driving an EV or even biking to work instead of hopping in the pickup). It'd be nice if there were some subsidies to make that easier... except those are now getting the axe.
    • zdragnar 1y ago
      Most of the "real" opposition is against providing further federal subsidies, along with it doesn't eliminate the need for base load during bad weather. The closing of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility has been making the rounds, as it had received $1.6 billion in funding but can't compete. I think most people would be less opposed if they saw the math behind more of the actual PV installations. > It's like hating bikers, why? Totally off topic, but I was walking through a city yesterday. Cars politely stopped for me as I crossed roads. Bikes didn't, and they also swerved onto sidewalks past me. They obeyed fewer rules of the road and put me at greater risk of harm than did any vehicle. I grew up an avid bicyclist out in the countryside, but people on bikes in the city manage to piss me off far more than most drivers do.
      • walkabout 1y ago
        Yeah, I don’t hate bicyclists in the “I would try to make them feel less safe” sense (I tend to go way the opposite way, if anything) but I do dread seeing them when driving or walking in the same spaces. They’re really unpredictable, and their presence creates extremely unsafe-feeling situations for everyone around. When I ride a bike, I don’t do it in places where, when I encounter a bike driving, it makes me especially anxious.
        • AtlasBarfed 1y ago
          Who is driving the two ton vehicle that has killed millions worldwide?
          • walkabout 1y ago
            Yes, of course. But the bikes are the ones making the space those murder-machines operate in operate differently from how it usually does, which is inherently not great. I’d like to see car use reduced as much as the next sane person, but I still go “ah, goddamnit” when I see a bicyclist approaching an intersection or come up on one going uphill on a twisty no-shoulder 35+ mph road.
            • 1y ago
    • volkl48 1y ago
      (To preface: I am strongly in favor of renewable energy overall). To the extent that there is anything real to their dislike: Poorly structured/overly generous homeowner net metering initiatives, especially for solar without storage, legitimately have escalated costs for everyone else in some regions. The excessive subsidy given to those homeowners for power that's often not very valuable (as it comes primarily at a time of day that's already well supplied) comes from somewhere, and somewhere is....the pockets of everyone who doesn't have home rooftop solar. And those people are typically poorer people in rented, denser housing than the average homeowner. Most places have been moving to correct this mistake for the future (ex: CA's "Net Metering 3.0"), but that also gets pushback from people who wanted to take advantage of that unsustainable deal from the government or who incorrectly think it's a part of general anti-renewable pushes. ------ Aside from that, in regions known for production of coal/oil/gas or major processing of, it's seen as a potential threat to jobs + mineral tax revenues that are often what underwrite most of their local/state government functions. While there are plenty of job creation claims for renewables, it doesn't take a genius to see that they don't appear to need all that many workers once built, and that the manufacturing chain for the solar panels or wind turbines is probably not to be put in places like West Virginia, Midland TX, Alaska, etc.
      • AtlasBarfed 1y ago
        Highest demand for energy is during the day. Highest output of solar is during the day. Your comment about energy supply implies we just don't need any solar at all. I think we need is a large set of incentives to do home solar with storage.
        • volkl48 1y ago
          My comment doesn't imply that at all. We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments). We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least. Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained. ------- Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest. Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low. With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves. A few illustrations/articles: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.iso-ne.com/about/where-we-are-going/solar-power-impact https://www.iso-ne.com/about/where-we-are-going/solar-power-... (New England).
    • atoav 1y ago
      Arguments only matter if we assume totally rational actors. There is ample evidence that this could potentially be a faulty assumption. A questiom: What do you think, do people first have an emotion and then try to rationalize it? Or do they first have a the rational judgment and only after that start to become emotional? If you watch right wing media it is pretty clear that emotions play a huge role for them. And because nobody particularly likes having emotions they can't explain, the rationalizations come after: "Windmills are destroy the landscape" (unlike let's say an oilfield which is somehow totally fine), things about the infrasound (which if a concern you can get rid off by the same way it is done with nuclear waste in the US, just use that massive land mass to your advantage). If we had rational, emotionally distanced actors they would change their mind once all doubts are addressed and the facts are on the table. But that is not the case here in my own experience. Once the last rationalization breaks they go back to the feeling of: "I just don't like it". That means the much more fruitful question to investigate is that particular dislike and where it might come from, emotionally. Surely this isn't just one root. For some it may be the "safe" opinion of their herd/tribe. Others say it, their entertainment (that under traditional media law wouldn't deserve the title "News") says it and so on. For yet others this may be a question of their insecure masculinity. They feel insecure, but men have to be strong! So they try their best to appear strong, by buying manly products, driving manly trucks and spouting manly opinions. You know what isn't manly in their mind? Being sensible. Sensible with other people, the environment, wensible with thought. And then a sensible energy option come around. Guess what, that feels like an attack to them. Suddenly society wants to erect huge pillars thst remind them that being sensible is now required. That really touches their core fear of not being manly enough. Being sensible could be misread as being gay after all. There are probably more reasons. P.S.: I am not saying there are no rational critics of wind energy. Whwt I am saying is the bulk of categorical dislike comes from an entirely uninformed, purely emotional direction
  • LUmBULtERA 1y ago
    Tell that to South Dakota's wind farms?
  • conception 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • rapind 1y ago
      I thought my statement was ridiculous enough to forgo the "/s".
      • Xss3 1y ago
        I thought the same about their question.
      • pstuart 1y ago
        Not in these times, even here on HN. SMDH.
      • scarecrowbob 1y ago
        Perhaps you're fortunate to run in different circles that I do, but I have heard that sentiment expressed similarly and unironically. Poe's Law and all...
      • i80and 1y ago
        Unfortunately, it's just a paraphrasing of unironic sentences I see daily.
  • dang 1y ago
    Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • rapind 1y ago
      I think it accurately and succinctly sums up the administration’s stance on clean energy. I’m not sure it’s inflammatory to point it out either since they’ve already said as much pretty clearly. It’s also a double entendre depending on which light you see “woke” in.
• chasd00 1y ago
  Texas is about as red as it gets and leads the nation in renewable energy including solar. Red or blue, if the gov can setup a situation where renewable energy is profitable then nature will take its course. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-tops-us-states-renewable-energy-battery-capacity-maguire-2025-01-09/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/texas-tops-us-states...
  • davedx 1y ago
    Renewable energy is profitable
    • abetusk 1y ago
      Renewable energy is already profitable.
    • rob74 1y ago
      Yeah, but if hindering it is an excellent way of pandering to your fossil fuel donors while at the same time "owning the libs", to hell with it!
  • dzonga 1y ago
    I lived in texas before & the first time I saw massive wind farms alongside oil pumps was in texas. wind turbines are wonderful things to look at. but yeah some of those were constructed in the years there was a "blue" admin n I guess market forces took over too.
    • dylan604 1y ago
      If you can use free energy to power your pumps to bring out that oil that just means there's that much more profit in the dinosaur juice
      • Scoundreller 1y ago
        At least it's only natgas for electricity, which is less valuable than oil. Saudi Arabia generates ~41% of its electricity from oil, 59% from natgas and <1% solar. Talk about mismanagement... https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/SAU/electricity/electricity-generation?pd=2&p=00000000000000000000000000000fvu0000000000000000000000000000000u&u=0&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&t=C&g=none&l=249--199&s=315532800000&e=1672531200000 https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/SAU/electrici...
• LUmBULtERA 1y ago
  I don't disagree about it being politicized, but if you look at the states with the highest amounts of renewable generation, your second sentence is not supported. There is a LOT of wind energy in Republican-led states in places where wind makes sense.
  • Xss3 1y ago
    Their first sentence could be called into question by that, not the second. The second specifies solar.
    • LUmBULtERA 1y ago
      Oh, that's fair point, except solar isn't relatively sparse in a lot of Republican led states too. Texas, Florida, North Carolina all have a relatively decent amount of solar, and Arizona does too which is... mixed?
    • infecto 1y ago
      And solar does show up in red states. I am not sure how this short administration would have had an impact on it. I don’t agree with the politicization of it but I suspect this has more to do with the parent energy grid and any constraints due to geography. Without a doubt I would expect the Midwest to have more.
  • southernplaces7 1y ago
    It's lovely to see actual data swat away ideological mosquito bite sniping points. The curious thing is that so many of these kinds of claims can be disproven in literally seconds to minutes in any debate, yet they persist. Certain tendencies aside, republican and conservatives types aren't utter idiots and do know how sidestep some rally talk to serve their own benefit if they think it's practical, profitable and useful. Not to mention that many conservatives love the field of off-grid prepping to this day and would certainly know about the value of solar, wind, hydro and any other robust renewable power technology. You're not going to build a coal plant or an oil refinery next to your deep-woods Utah cabin.
• bongodongobob 1y ago
  Yeah, in Oconto county Wisconsin, residents are all up in arms about a solar farm going up. It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money. The arguments against it are "this destroys farmland", "who will clean the snow off of it in winter", "I don't like how it looks", "static electricity will kill the crops around it", "it will raise the temperature of the surrounding area", "you can't recycle fiberglass so it's bad", etc.
  • bluedino 1y ago
    > It's the poorest county in the state and would bring in much needed money. What money? Power bills won't go down. The solar panel factories aren't in that county. The installers will be brought in from out of state contractors.
    • bongodongobob 1y ago
      The contractors that build it and the jobs to maintain them.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
        We should be honest and admit that the maintainance jobs are very, very few.
    • adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
      Power bills will go down. Solar electricity is by far the cheapest form.
      • JuniperMesos 1y ago
        But it's unreliable, and needs a lot of battery tech + overbuilding to make it reliable. Can people be confident that building the array will in and of itself make their electricity bills go down?
        • 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• bee_rider 1y ago
  Of course, as others have pointed out Texas is helping with renewables. On the other hand, at the federal level Republican admins tend to cut renewable subsidies and that sort of thing. Red states have a lot of open space and ought to be ideologically in favor is loose regulations; it would be kind of nice if Republican national politicians would fully embrace cronyism and identify renewable subsidies as an easy way to give money to their supporters. “Oh we did the environmental survey it turns out we should plop down a bunch of subsidized renewable installations in Red states.” Plenty of room for pork and might actually help the country as a side effect…
  • xp84 1y ago
    > renewable subsidies I think a lot of (honest) smart people would say that there are circumstances where even for those of us who love green energy (raises hand) subsidies aren't the most productive use of tax dollars. It can distort markets and can make the subsidized industry wasteful and uncompetitive, begetting reliance on the subsidy instead of pressuring them to compete. Solar and wind in 2025 aren't some fragile, experimental things that would die without subsidies. At this point they ought to be able to compete normally, and they can. Given a high percentage of the government dollars spent today aren't even tax dollars, they're borrowed money, at now-increasing interest rates, for our grandchildren to deal with, I'd rather not subsidize businesses that can get by on their own now.
    • dzhiurgis 1y ago
      My impression is that every industry is subsidize which totally distorts market (perhaps except for one who came up with subsidies in first place). On flip side the orangutang cut green energy subsidies on grade A farmland, which most likely wasn't happening anyway.
• JuniperMesos 1y ago
  There are both red states and blue states in places in the US that are good for solar power (rural, lots of sun). The sunny American southwest with huge amounts of empty desert land good for solar arrays includes the states of California (blue), Arizona (red), Nevada (toss-up), New Mexico (blue), and Texas (red). And the party that a state's population prefers in presidential elections isn't stable over mutli-decade time periods, but this doesn't change suitability for solar energy production.
• eigencoder 1y ago
  The blue ones generally have a lot of people and need a lot more energy
• buckle8017 1y ago
  The price of electricity in blue states has sky rocketed. Electricity in SF is now more than $0.50/kWh OFF peak. It is certainly not a coincidence that CalISO has contracted with the most solar generators.
  • xp84 1y ago
    It really is absurd how expensive our energy is across the state. Meanwhile Virginia gets electricity for 15 cents a kwh. Notably, the municipal power companies mostly are far lower. It's PG&E and SoCal Edison who are that high, because they're shoving the costs of doing 75 years worth of deferred system maintenance all at once onto current ratepayers instead of their investors taking the hit. It's too bad that there wasn't a viable legal framework whereby the investor-owned utilties' shareholders could be wiped out as they deserved to be, and the utility infrastructure transferred to municipal ownership. Around PG&E's bankruptcy there were rumblings, but Sacramento couldn't figure out how to do it, so they propped them up and created a Wildfire Fund paid for by ratepayers to keep bailing them out.
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  my red state is full of solar, so you may want to double check whatever sources you are using, as they seem dubious at best and biased at worst
• bushbaba 1y ago
  It’s likely more to do with population density. Middle America is a lot less dense. If you look both Florida and Georgia have solar installs and are “red” states
• BeetleB 1y ago
  Eh? Looking at, say, wind energy, the top 4 states are all red states. Their cumulative amount handily is more than the next so many states. That's absolute energy. If you want to go by percentage of energy that is wind, it's the same - the top 4 are red states. In fact, 7 of the top 10 are: https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-state/ https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/wind-generation-by-... I haven't looked at solar, but it doesn't seem there's a clear divide.