this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Lmfao you speak with authority despite it being complete bullshit.
"Heavy subsidies and huge upfront costs" applies far far more to oil and gas than to anything else. It's only due to the massive amount of technological and economic inertia behind oil and gas that it is still around.
For building new power generation, utility-scale solar and onshore wind are now almost universally cheaper than new coal, oil, or gas-fired power plants. This threshold was passed in most of the world around the mid-2010s and has become undeniable in the 2020s.
Solar is now often cheaper than existing fossil fuel plants: In many regions, it's now cheaper to build and operate a brand-new solar farm than to just keep running an existing coal or gas plant.
"The market" doesn't operate like you get taught as a child. The vast majority of economic decisions are made by those in power to ensure they stay in power. It makes little sense for a business person to cannabalise their own industry. They have vertically integrated and are invested in the supply chain from start to finish, and there's no benefit to them for things to change. It's far easier to just impede competitors than change the course of behemoth corporations.
You opened by insulting me instead of addressing my point, which says more about your argument than mine.
Claiming solar is automatically cheaper ignores system level costs. Wind and solar need storage, backup, and major grid upgrades, and those costs are still high. That is why renewables depend on large subsidies and mandates, just as fossil fuels have historically.
If solar were truly cheaper in a complete sense, companies would switch on their own because profit is a powerful incentive. The fact that adoption still relies on policy pressure shows the picture is more complicated than the simple claim that fossil fuels only survive through inertia.