DAVID BLACKMON: Is The Solar Boom About To Implode?

By now most everyone agrees that the wind industry is in big trouble, not just in the United States, but globally, as escalating supply chain issues and the impacts of Biden-era inflation eat away at project economics, interconnection queues grow longer and harder to break, and formerly accommodating governments balk at constant industry demands for ever-rising subsidies.

The big troubles for Big Wind are especially acute in the offshore sector, as evidenced most recently by Monday’s Reuters story about an array of developers like Orsted and Shell, along with big investment house Mitsubishi threatening to pull out of announced projects offshore Japan unless the Japanese government refills the subsidy trough. As always, the demand by Big Wind to sort-of live up to its glowing promises of “cheap” energy for all is “but, more subsidies!”

Sadly, Reuters reports that Japanese officials eager to signal their net-zero virtues are preparing to fold as if they were the governors of New York, Massachusetts, or New Jersey, or perhaps the chancellor of Germany or Prime Minister of England.

“Looking to defy the troubles plaguing renewables globally as operators scrap or shrink projects in Europe, the U.S. and Asia,” Reuters writes, “the government is holding talks with industry players, who are pressing for a number of measures to reduce risks and help cut costs on their projects.”

Inevitably, the alleged “measures” to “reduce risks and help cut costs” will evolve down to renegotiated guaranteed power delivery rates whose higher costs will be borne by unsuspecting Japanese citizens on their monthly electricity bills. This is how this game always comes out.

But Big Wind is going to find the renegotiation of previously agreed-to guarantees increasingly difficult to achieve as governments in places like the United States, the UK, Germany and other formerly eager jurisdictions discover that piling up more and more debt to fund what remains intermittent and unreliable power generation is simply unsustainable. And now, as I