Setting aside whether it’s a good or bad idea on its own, if the Trump administration is going to have heavy tariffs on solar panels and batteries out of China, my guess is that deploying solar right now is probably not economically viable, or at least considerably less so than it has been.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-dominates-solar-trump-tariffs-133600511.html

China dominates solar. Trump tariffs target China. For US solar industry, that means higher costs

https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/qa-solar-tariffs-and-the-us-energy-transition/

The US has taken aggressive actions to diminish the role of Chinese producers in solar supply chains. The costs of solar modules are already two to three times higher[22] in the US than those in Europe. A recent study in Nature[23] estimates that cutting China out of supply chains increases solar module prices 20 to 30 percent compared to a scenario with globalized supply chains. US climate goals are premised on the strategy of making solar and other clean energy technologies cheap; all else equal, more expensive solar makes those targets more difficult to achieve.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-09/trump-tariffs-threaten-spread-of-big-batteries-on-us-power-grid

Trump Tariffs Threaten Spread of Big Batteries on Power Grid

President Donald Trump’s trade war threatens to slow down a fast-growing technology that’s key to the clean-power transition and preventing blackouts — big batteries.

Energy storage devices large enough to feed the electric grid have been spreading across the US, with deployments surging 33% last year. Officials in California and Texas credit them with helping prevent blackouts during heat waves, when electricity demand soars, and integrating variable solar and wind power onto the grid. But despite efforts by former President Joe Biden to build a domestic supply chain, the US still relies heavily on imported lithium-ion batteries — with 69% of the imports made in China, according to the BloombergNEF research provider.

Whether-or-not Texas adds additional barriers on top of that may not matter all that much.

Cries in yeehaw.

It is totally just a co-inky-dink that Sandow Lakes Energy is trying to build a new gas power plant in Lee County or that Senate Bill 388 mandates that 50% of any new power generation capacity comes from dispatchable sources like natural gas but not from batteries.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Only if regulations benefits someone important though

Solar is booming out here in the sticks.

I was gonna say that people in Florida hit hurricanes a lot and also need some kind of local power generation — be it gasoline or whatever — to help mitigate outages from those.

But according to this, in 2021 — not a big hurricane year, admittedly:

https://generatordecision.com/states-with-the-most-least-reliable-power-grids/

Florida had the second-most-reliable power grid of any state in the US, with an average of 80 minutes of downtime per user per year, or 99.98% uptime.

EDIT: It’s kind of amazing how California manages to have almost the most expensive-in-the-US and fairly unreliable electricity.

EDIT2: They even comment on Florida and hurricanes:

Florida scores well in all three power grid reliability categories.

These are impressive statistics considering this state has to deal with so many hurricanes.

For what it’s worth, wind is huge in West Texas. And as the article points out solar wasnt doing to bad either l. After the failure of NG to keep the grid up during that cold snap they was supposed to be investments in diversifying our grid.

Our politicians are just dumb. Maybe they thought adding solar power to our grid was DEI.

Cruel, Texans are cruel.

Or idk… without democracy?

So, IIRC that’s basically what happened in California some years back — California put a lot of restrictions on coal generation in California, and Nevada ramped up coal generation and sold it to California.

Texas, however, has a fairly-unique situation. The federal government doesn’t generally have authority to regulate trade internal to states, but does — via the Commerce Clause — have authority to regulate commerce that crosses state lines. They’ve leveraged that into a lot of control over regulatory authority over state power grids — if a state has a power grid that crosses state lines, then they’re subject to federal regulation, which affects all sorts of things interior to the state. Texas decided that it wasn’t going to be subject to that, so it refused to connect its power grid to those of other states (though there was one rogue operator that did so until it was discovered and the rest of the Texas power industry made it disconnect; Planet Money had a podcast on it a while back). So you can’t just generate power across the border and then provide it to Texas consumers. If Texas changes the viability of a form of power generation in Texas, it changes what the Texas power consumer market has on offer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

I’d guess that the same situation probably also applies to Hawaii and Alaska, though in their case, it’d be one imposed by geographic necessity rather than wanting to avoid federal regulation.