If you have to pay for companies to make a product, and then pay for people to buy it, and then pay for them to use it, you don't have a product, you have government wishful thinking.
That is the problem with solar power. When the Obama administration first took a basic research funding effort and decided it was time to subsidize it, and a miracle of free markets would take over, companies which had lost money on it for 50 years were amused. Then he started throwing money at it. A lot. Predictably, it went to Democratic donors, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and many of them declared bankruptcy after getting the loans, but $4 trillion later the industry is starting to recoil.
The solar industry is complaining that the price of solar panels has...gone down. Just like government said they wanted to happen. And companies that count on high prices are complaining that China is the cause.
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Not that China is flooding the market, but rather that China is secretly bankrolling other companies that are making cheap panels for the US. A political party that claimed a coronavirus that erupted in Wuhan near two coronavirus labs couldn't possibly have come from Wuhan, despite them taking down a database of 15,000 coronavirus samples, and said it was all the fault of Republicans, is suddenly believing China is part of a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy to make Democrats look bad in an election year.
Except lower costs for panels don't make Democrats look bad, it makes them look right. The USSR tried to outspend the US once, and that communist dictatorship is gone. If China wants to spend its money giving us cheap solar power, okay.
Yet it is solar power lobbyists screaming foul. If they get to make a government-mandated 30% profit and the base prices of products drop, they make less money. Companies that are required to build solar farms by the same government mandates are happy they are wasting less money.
If we want solar power to go beyond the 0.06%, and to be viable rather than a huge drain on poor people in states like California, prices need to plummet. Companies that exploited their political connections to get rich can get replaced by legitimate market forces.
Perhaps the Biden administration will actually dismantle the Internet Equality that saddles poor people with high-priced high-speed service they won't want now that his subsidies for it are going to dry up.
