> $6B for a mere five years is highway robbery. Installing $4B of solar and $2B of batteries will result in 20-40 years of carbon-free electricity, and far far far more of it.
How would you install $6B overnight? That alone would take years. And where do you buy it from? China?
$6B is not a ton of money when it comes to solar and batteries, these are technologies on massive scales. Using round numbers of roughly $1/W for solar and $500/kWh, my off-the-cuff split buys 4GW of solar and 4GWh of batteries. For comparison, 6.5GW of solar was installed Q3 2023 in the US, and this is a tiny tiny fraction of the global market.
The challenge with large installs is the interconnection queue and permitting, not any industrial capacity limitation. And these could be solved by CPUC with a snap of their fingers, like they snapped their fingers to extend Diablo Canyon.
As someone who has worked closely with those running the Interconnection studies, this sounds overly rosey.
The ISO (in this case CAISO) runs those studies for a reason to maintain grid reliability. The reason they're slow is that it involves a crazy amount of simulations to determine grid upgrades and it is difficult when things must be done recursively and when the renewables developers speculate so much.
If the state regulator could snap their fingers, they would have done so in California, New York, the Midwest... everywhere. They made some changes to speed things up in Texas, but honestly they're kicking the can down the road.
China has the solar panel market cornered, so probably. Of course they might decide to cut us off given all the trade drama so I'm not sure even that is a sure thing.
How would you install $6B overnight? That alone would take years. And where do you buy it from? China?