Some Investments Are Bound to Fail–But Only Time Will Tell Us Which Ones

A common tactic of Big Oil and the rest of the Trump-supporting world is to point out that some of our government’s investments in cleantech do not pan out.

Unscrupulous people, as well as tens of millions of idiots, are enraged by these failures and interpret them as evidence of incompetence and/or corruption.

On the other hand, fair-minded people understand that it’s impossible for all these investments to be winners; some are bound to fail as the advancement of technology makes unforeseeable twists are turns.

The plummeting costs of solar PV and wind over the past 10 years wiped out a great number of investors in both the private and public sectors, and solar thermal (shown here) was only one.

As an example, I used to attend the annual conferences on hydrokinetics, and I always looked forward to them.  Guess what?  They’re gone. They no longer exist, as a result of the fact that the LCOE (levelized cost of energy) of all forms of hydro can’t compete on large-scale projects, and thus have been relegated to small, niche applications.

https://www.2greenenergy.com/2026/05/18/tactic-of-big-oil/