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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

I am deleting this and all my other deletable comments on this topic.

And that paper looks extremely fishy. You can see they tested with 10m/s and 15m/s. I definitely wouldn't want to live at place with average speeds like that. Then you need the wind to blow at a very specific angle of 10-15.

And they finish it with

> This analysis shows that AeroMINEs can be installed at $2,400/kW. Finally, at optimum performance AeroMINE systems can reach a LCOE of 10 C/kWh at just over 5 m/s average annual wind speed, which is highly competitive with a solar PV installation

How is the "analysis" showing that? There is no cost analysis in the paper and they never tested speeds of 5 m/s.

> Then you need the wind to blow at a very specific angle of 10-15.

It misses the obvious improvement where the platform rotates. I guess this is necessary for their costs target, but I don't think anybody would build this on practice without it.

> $2,400/kW

Anyway, isn't solar cheaper than that nowadays? I think the entire framing of competing with it is flawed, this should be complementing solar to reduce battery costs.

I maintain that the power of an intermittent generator should be considered in terms of watt-hours per year. Which is of course just watts, but collapsing the time terms obscures that it's a mean value, which the Whr/yr refuses to do.

Perhaps we could go full acre-foot here, and use the kilowatt-day per year. So a 100,000kWday/yr installation can provide 2kW to 500 homes for a hundred days.

Those of you who are aesthetically repelled by batteries using amp-hours instead of joules will really hate this one. But it gets at the difference between maximum continuous power, and total energy delivered per installation.

So, big 'it depends'. Anywhere where the wind averages the working speed more often than the sun averages the working luminosity will make wind cheaper in relative terms, and vice versa for solar.

Not to negate anything mentioned in the sibling comment, but yes. A home solar installation in Australia is about AUD$1.5 per watt for a complete system (panels, inverter, cabling, installation, sign off, etc) before subsidies.

For comparison with the OP system, an average 6kw system producing 8Mwh per year, with a conservative 15 year lifespan works out to AUD$0.075 per kwh.

($1AUD is currently USD$0.65)

>reflexive skepticism isn't any better than reflexive optimism.

it is in the current climate, with shady marketing and clickbait journalism producing three dozen such headlines every day

"They" should be the author of this article who chose the headline but failed to back up the claim in the story. If you are going to say that anything is 50% better, then at least show one instance where that was actually achieved. If you invent a new engine that you claim gets 50% better gas mileage, then you better show at least one trip of a significant distance where it did it.

I built a new database engine that I claim is at least 2x faster than Postgres at queries without needing separate indexes on the table columns. I don't claim it will always be that much faster on every query, but I show several instances where it is not only 2x faster, but 10x faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE

Without a video like this, I would not expect anyone to take my claims seriously.

According to the article, Aeromine is the company making the claim that the design can produce 50% more energy. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to validate that claim.

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