Writing in 2017, Raymond Gifford and colleagues described developments in the US renewables sector across the previous decade or so in terms of a ‘vicious cycle’: a gold rush mentality sparked vast (if regionally uneven) investment, precipitating local ‘oversupplied conditions’ that ‘undermined the financial stability of merchant generators, and eroded their capacity to attract and deploy capital over the long term’.32 Baldly stated, the ‘free market’ in the generation of renewable energy evidently includes the freedom to overinvest and lose money.
