Comment by tialaramex

> if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that

You're going to spend maybe a billion dollars to build your solar farm, maybe you get somebody to lend you the billion dollars at 4% annual interest for 10 years,

Your panels make maybe 1.5 TWh of electricity each year, you can sell that for maybe $50 per MWh, so that's $75M per year. But the interest on your loan was $40M, so after year one your owe $965M, after the ten year loan finishes you still owe almost $600M and your panels are now ten years old.

It's just a normal business venture, if you've got people who can execute and a favourable environment it should work, like if you opened a fast food chain, or a dry clean business or a distillery. This is completely different from resource owners, who instead are just granted ownership of a finite natural resource.