I mean the positive take is sustainable change needs to be profitable; unprofitable change always turns into corruption. It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar, while still having much cheaper electricity costs. When you create these government subsidized programs, you hurt low income individuals and risk creating bad government incentives.
Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.
> It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar
Texas surpassed California in terms of utility-scale solar because California both uses less electricity and has been so successful with distributed (customer premises) solar between the old incentives (now phased out) and its newer construction mandates that there is basically no energy demand for new utility solar to fill, because solar generation already peaks at above 100% of demand much of time, the utility demand is for storage and/or generation that is not on the same cycle as solar.
Texas has less total solar generation capacity than California, and gets much less of its total electricity from solar.
Best case is that all these companies doing solar stuff are "almost there" in terms of profitability and killing credits will kill some of them but the ones that don't die will find ways to be profitable on their own, which would be a very good thing.
It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons the electricity in Texas may be cheaper is due to not winterizing the grid and the lack of planning for deep freezes. Anyone else remember the black outs?
You do realize how much worse blackouts in CA are, right? TX never even experienced a full grid collapse like CA; CA has planned blackouts based on how dry the forests are, because power companies aren't allowed to trim nearby trees.
I don't mean to get personal but this is a really ill-informed opinion. Texas has to deal with hurricanes and legitimate weather events, CA has invented problems that cause blackouts at the expense of CA taxpayers; meanwhile CA pays 2-3x for the same power. It's really not a good comparison, CA has a famously mismanaged electric grid
87 people died in the 2018 CA outage, and PG&E was eventually charged with 117 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Nobody died due to power outages in Texas during the freeze, and the power companies were not charged with any counts of involuntary manslaughter.
In 2024, there were no deaths due to power outages in CA or in TX.
That said, comparing natural disaster deaths is a stupid way to measure the success or failure of a power grid. Success should be determined by factors like uptime or cost.
Why don't you look up the uptime and cost of the Texas grid vs the CA grid in 2024?
Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.