Environmental concerns about displacing protected wildlife can be mitigated by installing relatively inexpensive things. Ditto for concerns about displacing lo

Environmental concerns about displacing protected wildlife can be mitigated by installing relatively inexpensive things. Ditto for concerns about displacing low-income families. The real problem is that electricity in California is cheap and it is impossible to build a profitable utility-scale solar farm without monetary government incentives or a down-round. The former is winding down and the availability of the latter is constrained by a negative feedback loop. The expiration of federal, state, and utility incentives, mainly ARRA Section 1603, really screwed up the solar market in most of the US. Uncle Sam used to give developers of renewable projects (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydro, etc) 30% of the total cost of the project in cash within a month or two of completion. Congress refused to renew that program after Solyndra, even though it was probably responsible for building several nuclear generators worth of renewable capacity. Companies can still get tax credits, but these newly-formed single-asset corporations that typically own the farms don't have any tax liability to offset. They can monetize the tax equity by doing some screwed up partnership flip structure, but that is time intensive and costly. States also used to have incentives which ranged from state tax credits to RECs. These tax credits are even harder to monetize since now you need to find an equity partner who has a multimillion dollar state tax liability in, say, North Carolina. The market for RECs collapsed right after the utilities came close to meeting their renewable portfolio standards. Most of the current pipeline of utility scale projects in the continental US involves a cramdown of the initial investors and developers. Everyone is looking for "broken" projects where someone else already spent the time and capital to get the project shovel ready. At the smaller end, there are even some contractors who financed the construction loans themselves and are being crammed down by the takeout guys. At the same time, many lenders have discontinued new lending and monetizing tax equity is expensive and difficult. There are some exceptions such as Hawaii where 90% of their electricity is generated from oil so electricity prices are sky-high (think 5x+ California), but the local utility can't keep up with the requests for permits so projects wait in an ungodly long queue.