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California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed SB 868, a bill legalizing residential solar panels for balconies. At a time when the Trump administration is unraveling federal climate progress, California’s so-called “Plug and Play Solar Act” enables homeowners and renters to purchase and plug lightweight solar panels into a regular power outlet and generate up to 1200 watts of electricity. While environmentalists are hailing the bill as a major step toward mitigating climate change, balcony solar is a mere consolation prize in comparison to rooftop solar, which could have made solar power ubiquitous in the nation’s most populous state if it hadn’t been derailed by the state government in order to protect private utilities’ profits.

Joshua Frank, co-author of the new book, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future, explained in an interview that “for those who have lived in California for over the last 15, 20 years, there was a heyday for rooftop solar.” Frank added: “You could walk anywhere, and someone was trying to tell you, you can buy rooftop solar,” because there was a “big solar boom happening in the state” as a result of public subsidies.

The idea of generating power right where it’s most needed is an ideal solution to help stabilize a warming climate. With the cost of solar panel technology falling dramatically, all that is needed is for governments to incentivize the public to adopt solar power. According to Environment America, that looks like “supportive public policies that make it convenient, fast and affordable to install solar panels,” including rebates and tax credits, and “rules such as ‘net metering’ that assure fair and adequate compensation for the extra solar power that panel owners send to the grid.”

Starting in the mid-2000s, California did just that, doubling down every few years to offer stronger inducements for residents to adopt solar technology. “People were putting rooftop solar with government subsidies on their roofs, and it was fantastic,” said Frank. “We were actually setting the standard of what you can do to combat climate change on the solar level.” As rooftop solar became more popular, there were dreams of a wave of green energy jobs buoying the state’s economy.

But there was one problem that climate justice advocates hadn’t counted on: the falling corporate profits of utilities companies like Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), which were making money from building out the transmission grid rather than selling electricity to consumers. Bernadette Del Chiaro, a senior vice president with the Environmental Working Group in California, said: “These utility companies are essentially construction companies. They make money off of building all of those transmission lines, so they’re constantly pushing to have power plants located really far away from where we all live and work so that we’re dependent on........

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