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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

"This is a pretty facetious comparison." Is it? A few weeks ago I noticed that the wind in my state was below 5mph over the entire state, for the entire day, with temperatures in upper 90's. You literally can't overbuild wind enough to account for this.

Add in that the latest nat-gas installation in my state from start to finish cost 1/4th the price of our last wind turbine installation, if you compare actual power produced over the year instead of simply comparing max rated production.

That's when I realized that you literally can't have enough wind to replace CO2 producing power and nuclear is the only reasonable answer.

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The economics of wind, solar, gas, and nuclear are very well documented and known. Making a robust grid is well known.

"That's when I realized"

You understand how utterly ridiculous this sounds, right?

"That's when I realized that spacecraft should be made out of aluminum foil"

Who am I to believe? The published costs of installations coupled with power company records or studies which don't look anything like real world data, but always unerringly tell me wind is cheaper.

I based my opinion on real world data, and only real world data could change it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous where you're standing, but I'll never know.

And like my man Richard Feynman would say if he were alive today, p-hacking, cargo culting, and outright fraud are alive and well - endemic in the life or death sciences - and super-saturating the more politicized sciences. Takes 5 minutes to get a rough estimate of something to see if a study is even close to being accurate. Try it. Pick a small wind market in ideal conditions, pick an established utility with public records, and do the work yourself.

> with temperatures in upper 90's

The implication here being that air conditioning will be using lots of power? Surely using solar PV for air conditioning is the most obvious pairing out there. It's rarely hot and not sunny.

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