Hacker News Reader

Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I like about this site is the restraint (at least in comparison to other places) in substituting an argument this kind of snarky scoffing and engagement. It’s brainless.

Agriculture is already working, or was until its been starting to be shut down and curtailed due to alleged environmental issues like in the Netherlands. You can manage much larger chunks of land with plows and combines and other vehicles because of how you interact with the land when farming.

You can’t plant solar panels and have them just grow out of the ground and repair themselves and reproduce largely independently. It’s a totally different type of land use. Managing solar farms is magnitudes more effort to build and maintain than agriculture.

View on HN

Yes, solar and wind take money to build and operate.

They require less money to build, and less to operate, than nuclear (per unit of energy output).

So, your talking about land could only be a valid objection if land itself was the constraint. And that's what my snark about eating was aimed at.

Costs on paper, cost in reality over time, and cost due to physical and manpower constraints vs cost due to government subsidies and regulation are not equivalent.

This claim that 10 million acres of solar panels is cheaper to build and maintain and actually put into use and store power from vs extremely high energy output nuclear plants with tiny footprints that can produce continuously reeks of extremely biased accounting.

We can look at actual costs in the real world to confirm what I just told you. This is not some conspiracy to defame your energy waifu.

The arrogance and presumption is the issue. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy at all. Frankly I don’t trust people who aggressively point to models and facts and figures and don’t actually engage with the WHY and the caveats and actually think about the risk of non correspondence between the figures and the real world.

That does not mean you’re wrong, I simply don’t trust your hand wavy dismissive argument about it being cheaper.

If I see a report that looks at the long term maintenance cost of an actually deployed modern solar farm, not hypothetical ones, and compares it to an actually deployed modern nuclear reactor, I’ll take that one.

I have an affinity for whatever actually works, the main reason I think nuclear looks good is I trust basic physics and understand how much astronomically higher the energy density of nuclear power is in comparison to like everything else.

The economics of renewables are the simplest and most transparent ever seen in power generation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com