Hi. I'm an Electrical Power Engineer and I analyzed electrical power energy pricing for three years after working a startup designing renewable stations.
I worked at the NYISO, which runs all the real time energy pricing markets on a realtime power market separate from the public stock market. The issue is this. NYISO, MISO, ERCOT, CAISO run real time energy markets throughout the U.S.
The idea is energy demand is met with energy supply obtained at the LBMP (locational based marginal price) from energy bid into the markets by energy suppliers who can meet demand in that area (transmission line losses are 10%) so there is an advantage to local/decentralized energy as the markets price congestion on these transmission lines.
Transmission lines are expensive (consider buying up all those little protesting family farms lawsuits buying individual land) and will melt or if run beyond 90% of their capacity which could leave an area stranded and blacked out by cascading over voltage conditions and blacking out the entire power grid.
So the tldr is energy can only move so far before it becomes uneconomic and needs to be synced with another power bus.
Now, you have politicians throwing free money in subsidies, grants or 20yr loans to Venture capital funds who contract renewable energy farms like wind for example. They get paid subsidies for the power they produce.
That sounds reasonable, but this is where it becomes unreasonable. Power is realtime and needs to respond to demand usage.
The other important thing to note is even if we did vote for high taxes in the u.s. to fund clean energy, clean energy is massively inefficient right now, and this doesn't provide an economic incentive to innovate in the industry. Quite the opposite. It makes the people raking up this free money hapoy sitting on their behinds, which brings me to my previous point,
The VCs get paid to produce power but not when it's needed. They could store this in a battery somewhere, but it turns out hurricane Sandy flooded a $50million battery that was supposed to back up all of long island. Ironic. Most investors tweaked out after this, and anyways, why would venture capitalists spend their free money on actually investing in making the technology better by buying batteries to save power being produced when it's not needed (a windy night on a mtn vs 4pm the next day when everyone is using power) when they are getting paid either way?
The money that isn't lining their pockets is subsidizing their cost of production bids into thr market. So wind plants in NY always bid in at $0 and they get the bid to produce Everytime.
Since every five minutes economic dispatch (Google "acopf ferc") creates a price signal based on demand needed and this can actually drive the price negative. The decision making tree here is based on a mixed integer programming algorithm for which the implementation is close sourced by an algorithm contracting company, which I personally think is an egregious injustice to stakeholders but that's just me.
Sounds great, how does it get worse?
Well, because not in my backyard policy, all of these wind plants are in upstate NY, so they have to waste and dissipate 10% of the power on the way down to NYC clogging the transmission lines, if they happen to be running when it's needed.
For the few companies truly interested in putting batteries on their plants, the NYISO, CAISO and ERCOT are decades behind implementing the legal economic markets for these generators to engage in to set up batteries at different entry points on the power grid than where they are supplying it.
Germany runs on 50% solar and does well, which clearly shows this is not a technical background but a legal, political and organizational one. However, the economic efficiency is not entirely revealed t us. Do you think the u.s. would vote for 50% taxes like they have in Germany?
Hope that helps and feel free reach out if you have any more questions.