“The days of stupidity” are alive and well in the USA after the Department of the Interior cancelled a Nevada solar farm slated to become the world’s largest. The 185-square-mile, 6.2-GW Esmeralda 7 solar and battery storage installation would have powered almost two million homes, but was unceremoniously dumped according to President Donald Trump’s wishes as indicated in his typical Truth Social style. Not only is Trump’s post full of lies about energy costs, such policy is casting a dark shadow over the economic future of the USA.

In the early 1980s, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory director Roland Hulstrom calculated that a 10,000 square-mile photovoltaic (PV) solar farm could power the entire US grid. Spread across existing rooftops – factories, warehouses, parking lots, and over 100 million American homes – the impact would be marginal. Colorado School of Mines professor John Fanchi made a similar calculation in 2004 for wind power: 12.7 million 4-MW turbines spread over 50,700 1-GW farms could power the entire globe.

A 2008 Scientific American cover story, “A Grand Plan for Solar Energy,” outlined how the US could free itself from foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 using solar power: “The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year.”

In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, “Solar Panels for Every Home,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted that solar panel prices had dropped 80% in five years and could generate electricity at or below grid prices in 20 states, succinctly stating “We have the technology. The economics make sense.........

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