Not so much this specific structure as the structure at all, the ownership of energy resources.
In a country like the US somebody owns the coal. They didn't make that coal, but we decided they can own it anyway, and so even though they didn't make the coal and it's never going to be replaced, just destroyed for all time, they get to capture the economic value from that.
Nobody, even in the US, owns the wind, and a wind farm doesn't capture some finite wind and gradually use it up, there's more wind where that came from, essentially forever.
Solar is even worse, because it works at a tiny scale. Owning your own wind turbine almost never makes sense but owning some solar panels makes sense for most owner-occupiers, especially if you live outside a city.
I don't think Trump would care whether the guy handing him an "America's Best Ever President" trophy and a $5Bn check is a Californian Sunlight Baron or a Wyoming Coal Baron, but the problem is that there can't be a Californian Sunlight Baron. You can't own California's sunlight, that's not a thing.
This point is very useful to me. I consider myself a pretty good engineer and a not so good entrepreneur. Maybe I'm not so good at it because I find it far more interesting to think every detail of PKCE, something only tangentially related to my work, than I do to think about how to make all the money.
It would never have occurred to me that the appeal of carbon based fuel over renewables is that carbon base fuels are not renewable. There is less of a moat. Huh!
In a country like the US somebody owns the coal. They didn't make that coal, but we decided they can own it anyway, and so even though they didn't make the coal and it's never going to be replaced, just destroyed for all time, they get to capture the economic value from that.
Nobody, even in the US, owns the wind, and a wind farm doesn't capture some finite wind and gradually use it up, there's more wind where that came from, essentially forever.
Solar is even worse, because it works at a tiny scale. Owning your own wind turbine almost never makes sense but owning some solar panels makes sense for most owner-occupiers, especially if you live outside a city.
I don't think Trump would care whether the guy handing him an "America's Best Ever President" trophy and a $5Bn check is a Californian Sunlight Baron or a Wyoming Coal Baron, but the problem is that there can't be a Californian Sunlight Baron. You can't own California's sunlight, that's not a thing.