A series of policies that ranged from disincentivizing to straight-up penalizing homeowners who have embraced rooftop solar. “Everybody likes to talk about how Florida and Texas are out-competing California right now on renewable energy,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro, a VP at the Environmental Working Group. “And there is a whole lot of truth to it, because California is totally getting in its own way.”

I mean, tap the breaks. Texas and Florida are also working to undermine rooftop solar.

But the incentives for the rollout are often too strong. The Texas electric grid - loosely managed by ERCOT in order to maximize revenues for gas electric power utilities - have resulted in a blowback of routine brownouts and sky high seasonal bills. Florida’s own utility mismanagement, worsened by sever weather and routine major flooding events, has resulted in a DIY home electricity approach.

California’s own degraded and dysfunctional state grids have produced the same perverse incentives, even as wind and solar farms flourish thanks to the sub-fossil fuel price for installation by the MWh. This is unfortunate because rooftop solar simply isn’t as efficient as the industrial scale utility-level projects that power the grid as a whole. Rooftop solar is a backstop against price gouging and grid malfunction, but it isn’t in any way cost-efficient relative to a public sector wholesale rate for electricity.

Green Energy should be a windfall for electricity consumers, but it is turning into a price ceiling for greedy privatized utility companies, instead.