It has to do with keeping up with the news and current events around the world.
There are a number of news indexes dealing with renewables plus the stand by of searching google news.
Plus the fact that Texas has a substantial amount of renewables and spent a sizable sum of money on transmission lines to transport that renewable power. Consequently, money from all over the US and the world is flowing into Texas to produce it and consume it. What we need now is the interstate High Voltage DC lines to export it into TVA territory
The problem is that the news and current events are even more biased about “renewable” energy than they are on politics. While I do enjoy tinkering with this stuff a great deal, the large scale projects subsidized by the government have repeatedly proven to be pie and the sky failures based on false premises. The only thing that they do efficiently is funnel money into the pockets of political donors.
A good example are the claims that you cite that solar power can now be produced for 12 cents per kwh or less. What we are talking about is not comparable to energy produced by power plants or hydroelectric dams. It is just not true, not by a long shot. The only time the production costs approach 12 cents per kwh are on a clear day when the cells are receiving direct sunlight and all of the power can be used directly, and even that is a blatant exaggeration because the upfront costs are spread out over who knows how many decades and most likely assuming an unrealistic amount of sunny days, unrealistic maintenance costs, and the expectation that all of the generating capacity can be utilized. None of the assumptions made are realistic.
What happens at the times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing and how much efficiency is wasted trying to convert the DC voltage coming from solar panels into high voltage AC? Also if we are really talking about converting most of our energy production to renewables, how do you take into account the times that there would be excess generating capacity available? How do you figure that into the cost of production? Every article I have read hyping solar or wind power does not take any of this into account.
To get what I am saying think about it on the small scale. If you are like our friends and your batteries are fully charged and the sun is shining; it doesn’t make any difference how much power your solar panels are capable of producing... it is just wasted capacity. That is something that these articles never take into account.
You still have to have the gas or coal fired turbines for times when the sun is not shining and the wind isn’t blowing, because currently the grid has no storage capacity. I don’t care how good new batteries have gotten because there are no realistic plans to supplement the grid with a bunch of batteries. Gas and coal fired plants run most efficiently at full power. It is not as pronounced, but even my little back-up generators run most efficiently at their rated capacity. If you buy a generator that is much larger than you need, you are wasting a lot of gas compared to a smaller machine when you have only a small load connected to them.
So yes you are drinking the Kool-Aid, and you are cheerleading something that you do not seem to understand. It has been proven repeatedly that Google is a biased source of information. I am sure that there is a lot of money flowing into Texas for “renewable energy”, but it has a lot more to do with government subsidies for crony capitalists with friends in high places than actual energy production.