I worked on a phase 0 grant submission team in a college class a couple years ago on the operations and finance end with other teams in other schools - CS/engineering, etc - for an underwater energy storage system.
Essentially everything was faked. The math didn't check out and the engineering students called this out over and over. It just didn't work and even if it did they would almost never recoup their costs. But grant approved, CEO who worked with us all who was very bright always brushing us off if we touch if real cost outside of being almost fully subsidized. His firm has been doing this with gas and solar since the 90s, seemed pretty cool till you see how the sausage is made. To be honest a lot of what his firm made was real functional stuff, but this cash grab while Biden was throwing around wind money was crazy.
It was absolutely wild to realize all this was just a game
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not on the same scale, but on highschool once a kind teacher that really liked solar asked us (it was a technical school with electricity specialization) to calculate the cost of putting solar panel on her house so it'd have 24/7 solar powered electricity.
so solar + batieres + the cost of installing it all. She was a philosophy teacher, so she expected to be more expensive.
it turned out to be a disputatious amount more expensive, to the point that it'd have been cheaper to buy a new house after using it for 10 years levels of more expensive since Argentina didn't give any subsidies and we'd had had to import almost all of it. (so extra cost of tariff)
Solar surely must have improved ever since (we did that around 2010) but i doubt it became good enough even now xD
Assuming a null hypothesis that interventions in the free market introduce inefficiencies is a great way to not be surprised.
