“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton Friedman observed decades ago. Such applies to two current politically correct, economically incorrect energies: solar and wind as grid electricity.
Both technologies have a long, experimental backstory. And each has been perennially uncompetitive, requiring never-ending tax subsidies and other special government favors.
Charles Fritts reputedly installed the first solar panels on a New York City rooftop in 1884. A burst of projects and patents followed in the next decades as curious, monied entrepreneurs sought an alternative to coal-fired generation. Frank Shuman’s Sun Power Company commercialized flat-plate collectors and built the first solar thermal power station in Egypt in 1913.
Technological success in these and similar endeavors was not met by commercial viability. “[T]he fact is, however,” John Ericsson noted decades earlier, “that although the heat is obtained for nothing, so extensive, costly, and complex is the concentration apparatus that solar steam is many times more costly than steam produced by burning coal.”
Turning wind into electricity dates from 1888, when arc-lighting entrepreneur Charles F. Brush installed a windmill to power his Cleveland home. American companies would pick up the pace in the 1920s. During World War II, the 1.25 MW Grandpa’s Knob wind turbine distributed electricity to Central Vermont Public Service Corporation, an experiment that in 1945 led the Federal Power Commission (now FERC) to estimate the potential of domestic wind power.
Free energy spun the turbines, but the conversion to electricity was material- and capital-intensive—and intermittent. An 1883 article in Scientific American noted wind’s unpredictable flow, requiring “gathering it at the time when we do not need it and preserving it till we do.” But storage was—and still is—uneconomic.
Fast forward to the 1970s when U.S. price controls on natural gas and oil led to shortages and fears of Peak Oil and Peak Gas. Solar became the political energy of choice for President Carter, beginning with a 10 percent Investment Tax Credit in 1978. Extensions followed in 1980, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991.
The Energy Policy Act of 1992, increasing the ITC to 30 percent of invested capital, was extended in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2022, the most recent being in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. In all, solar has received 15 extensions of its “temporary” program to date.
Wind power has relied on the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit, first established in 1992. The PTC has been extended 12 times: 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2022 (IRA).
Amid all the extensions were promises and predictions of impending competitiveness. In 1983, a study for the Solar Energy Industries Association, American Wind Energy Association, and Renewable Energy Institute stated: “The private sector can be expected to develop improved solar and wind technologies which will begin to become competitive and self-supporting on a national level by the end of the decade [1990] if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D.” No true then and now.
A century and a half of entrepreneurial effort, and a half century of enabling government subsidies, have revealed the mirage of so-called green energy. Hydrocarbons are dense, plentiful, affordable, transportable, and reliable. Oil, gas, and coal are easily stored, and each is now an environmental product.
Wind and solar energy are dilute, intermittent, fragile, surface-intensive, transmission-extensive, and government-dependent. End-of-life disposal issues remain. Compare this to the sun’s work over the ages, fossil fuels. Oil, gas, and coal replaced the 100 percent market share of renewables centuries ago for good reason. Public policy should heed this energy reality.
Documentation
“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Milton and Rose Friedman, Tyranny of the Status Quo (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 115.
Charles Fritts in New York City (1884): Elizabeth Chu and D. Lawrence Tarazano, “A Brief History of Solar Panels,” Smithsonian Magazine (April 22, 2019).
Frank Shuman and the Sun Power Company. Christopher R. Dougherty, “Frank Shuman: Finding the Future in Tacony, A Century Ago,” Hidden City (May 30, 2014).
Frank Shuman’s Egypt Project, 1913. Stephen Dowling, “The Forgotten 20th Century ‘Sun Engine.’” BBC.com (April 21, 2023).
“American Inventor Uses Egypt’s Sun for Power,” New York Times (July 2, 1916)
John Ericsson quotation on solar non-competitiveness. John Ericsson to Robert Bennet Forbes, September 21, 1878, quoted in William Conant Church, The Life of John Ericsson, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1890], 1911), vol. 2, p. 271.
General history of solar. Robert Bradley Jr., “Solar Is Not an Infant Industry” MasterResource (October 6, 2009)
First wind project (1888). “Mr. Brush’s Windmill Dynamo,” Scientific American 63, no. 25 (December 20, 1890), p. 389.
1.25 MW Grandpa’s Knob Wind Turbine. Dan Reicher, “The Unlikely Birth of Modern Renewable Energy on a Mountain Top in Vermont – 75 Years ago Today,” Stanford Law School, SLS Blogs (October 19, 2016).
Wind intermittency quotation. “The Storage of Wind Power,” Scientific American 49, no. 2 (July 14, 1883), p. 17.
Solar and wind tax subsidies since the 1970s. Thomas J. Pyle, Kenny Stein, Alexander Stevens, “Don’t Fall for the Phase-Out Fallacy.” Institute for Energy Research, May 6, 2025
Impending competitiveness of wind and solar quotation. Booz, Allen & Hamilton study, May 1983. Renewable Energy Industry, Joint Hearing before the Subcommittees of the Committee on Energy and Commerce et al., House of Representatives, 98th Cong., 1st sess. June 28, 1983. (Report submitted by Joel Weiss, chairman of the Government Relations Committee of the Solar Energy Industries Association), p. 52.
Robert L. Bradley Jr. “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No
