Progressive hubris and solar energy

In response to your Dec. 15 story, “Could solar panel mandate see light?”:

The idea that Nevada should use as a road map California’s mandate that solar panels be installed on all new homes (adding an estimated $10,000 cost per home in the state’s already unaffordable housing market) because it could “double (our) existing solar capacity by 2045” prompted me to check the date. Sure enough, it was Dec. 15, 2018. I’m no genius at math, but that makes 2045 about 26 years in the future. This made me reminisce about what it was like 26 years ago.

In 1992, there was no discernible internet, no Facebook, no Twitter and no Google. We contacted each other via “snail mail” or landlines. There was no email or smartphones. Twenty-six years ago, there was a Blockbuster Video store on almost every corner. Sears and J.C. Penney were high-flying retailers. Today, Blockbuster is long gone, Sears is in bankruptcy and J.C. Penney appears headed that way. Amazon dominates retail. Know anyone who accurately predicted all this in 1992?

So excuse me if I have trouble with the hubris of progressive prognosticators who predict what will occur 26 years in the future when it comes to energy. The odds are great that, by then, solar panels will be as distant a memory as the eight-track, the video recorder and the telegraph are today. However, the costs imposed on today’s homebuyers by “touchy-feely” mandates such as this one will have yet to be fully paid off.

By the way, we do have solar panels on our roof. We did this, however, because we made a free choice, not because some bureaucratic drone demanded it.