[teemur]

Don't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.

[nielsole]

I still wonder the same about the EU and LED lighting. Prohibiting traditional bulbs was highly controversial at the time

[dylan604]

if we didn't transition through the horrible days of CFLs first. since we did, that's a big knock against

[antonymoose]

I remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners.

Something sad about that, really.

[hylaride]

A lot of them got built with per-mile subsidies and cashed out via shoddy construction. The ones that focused on long-term financial sustainability more often did fine, but it is a lesson in perverse incentives (though some would argue that afterwards cheap overbuilt lines facilitated much faster and more extensive westward expansion of people).

[twoodfin]

The lesson, which we learned in the dot-com era and will likely learn again in the AI era, is that the benefits of step-change new infrastructure technology do not accrue in the long run to the infrastructure builders—the technology only creates the step-change if it finds its way to being a commodity!—but diffuses throughout the new, ultimately much larger, more productive economy as a whole.

[csours]

See also the dark fiber build out before the telecom collapse of ~2001

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

[aworks]

Leland Stanford made out ok, AFAIK

[uecker]

It has been called a "gift to the world". https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/science/earth/sun-and-win...

But since then there was an endless stream of negative press especially in English speaking countries against German energy policies, so not much of this positive comments are still remembered.

[schmorptron]

It's probably because germany decided to sorta give up on it and all of the production and further research moved to china?

[blubber]

That's not true. I think China is grateful to them for selling them their PV industry for a Wurstbrot.

[Phelinofist]

Yeah and then we let it die