Let's leave aside the political unit of MI for a moment.
What you are saying, in economic terms, is that investment is following the greatest return, and that the greatest return is to be found in areas where resources are superior to other resources. In your mind you seem to have developed a generalized resource map onto which you overlay your understanding of the available technologies.
That isn't exactly 'wrong' but there are some areas where your mental model could be improved. For example the benchmark you are using is extremely nebulous. You are concluding that the only time there is economic justification for exploiting a resource is if it in the the location of the "best" resource on the entire continent.
That isn't how it is done. These decisions are made at the local level looking at the benefit/cost of the range of available options. One benchmark in that calculus is the retail price of electricity, another is the wholesale price of electricity. But that is hardly the only thing that is considered. For example, New Jersey is one of the very top states in solar; not because it has a superior resource, but because the land costs are extremely high due to high population density. These land costs drive up the relative costs of running power lines or building local conventional power plants. The state determined subsidized rooftop solar was the most economically effective way to meet increases in their their peak power requirements. Other line items for them were the environmental benefits and the positive public reaction to the program.
By looking at the issue using such a large map, you are losing the resolution that makes clear what is actually going on at ground level. Germany is investing heavily in solar, not because they don't have access to an area like our desert SW (they are also pursuing projects built in Spain) but because the fundamental premise of their transition is to break up the power that centralized generation gives the elites and return control of energy to the individual and local level.
BTW, your good will and intentions are never at issue. You are in good company when using obsolete 'conventional wisdom'.
Conventional Wisdom About Clean Energy Is Still Way Out of Date
“It’s not 1990 anymore.”
CHRIS NELDER: MAY 9, 2013
"We're fifteen to twenty years out of date in how we think about renewables," said Dr. Eric Martinot to an audience at the first Pathways to 100% Renewables Conference held April 16 in San Francisco. "It's not 1990 anymore."
Dr. Martinot and his team recently compiled their 2013 Renewables Global Futures report from two years of research in which they conducted interviews with 170 experts and policymakers from fifteen countries, including local city officials and stakeholders from more than twenty cities. They also reviewed more than 50 recently published scenarios by credible international organizations, energy companies, and research institutes, along with government policy targets for renewable energy, and various corporate reports and energy literature.
The report observes that "[t]he history of energy scenarios is full of similar projections for renewable energy that proved too low by a factor of 10, or were achieved a decade earlier than expected." For example, the International Energy Agency's 2000 estimate for wind power in 2010 was 34 gigawatts, while the actual level was 200 gigawatts. The World Bank's 1996 estimate for China was 9 gigawatts of wind and 0.5 gigawatts for solar PV by 2020, but by 2011 the country had already achieved 62 gigawatts of wind and 3 gigawatts of PV.
Dr. Martinot's conclusion from this exhaustive survey? "The conservative scenarios are simply no longer credible."
There is now a yawning gap between "conservative" scenarios and more optimistic ones, as illustrated in this chart contrasting scenarios published in 2012 by entities like the IEA and ExxonMobil with those offered by groups like the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (an international scientific policy research organization), Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund....
Much more at
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/conventional-wisdom-about-clean-energy-is-way-out-of-date
Hope that helps.
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