America’s clean energy is stuck.

According to this recent article in the Economist, the US clean energy investment in solar and wind generation is set to decline by at least 10% in 2022 over 2021. Despite a democrat administration and a congress that are theoretically very pro clean energy and want to supposedly invest heavily, the net effect of the administration's actions on tariffs and sanctions on China  is to reduce investment while simultaneously congress cannot pass any new investment support. This not only sets back progress on achieving green energy goals, it also reduces employment by several hundred thousand jobs, severely damaging the democrat pro labor image.

The US is already a relatively low investor in clean energy, especially considering the size of its economy. Fossil fuel interests are dominant and the partisan divide ensures there is no consensus. The economist article explains the current decline is due more to internal politics within democrats than rising costs and supply chain constraints. 

The politically correct consensus on solving climate change by reducing CO2  focuses on government action. There has been government action for several decades and it has achieved some limited success. However progress stalled almost a decade ago and the simplest explanation is that we have reached the limit of what government action alone can achieve.

Historically energy transitions only occur when there are significant  benefits of the transition over the past status quo. The evidence is that the real cost of current wind and solar are too high for market forces to lead the transition and we have reached the political limit of government action. 
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​Stratosolar eliminates the need to solve the intermittency problem with solar and also reduces the cost of generation by a factor of three. Overall this means that it is a dispatchable direct replacement for natural gas at a lower cost. This can be a basis for a successful energy transition in a relatively short time frame. As with current solar, the learning curve is still operating and costs can continue to fall, further accelerating the clean energy transition.

By Edmund Kelly