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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

A clean power grid means cheaper power. And the faster we push towards that future, the more money we save.

Every day of delay, every bit of FUD about renewables, only serves to keep our energy costs higher, and make our future CO2 cleanup problem harder.

The future for energy is cheap and clean, and the major roadblock are the people who profit from expensive and dirty electricity.

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> A clean power grid means cheaper power.

That's a pretty wild assertion, given current events. Care to back it up with some evidence from a neutral source?

https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEn...

This research is solid and goes in depth about the costs etc.

The PDF you linked does not contain empirical data on existing solar and wind installations. It's an investment pitch.

Not who you are asking, but here is some recent research using probabilistic cost forecasts: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X

I am not asking for forecasts of what could theoretically happen in the future: I want to see an analysis of existing installations.

It’s literally there in figure 1. Wind and PV are now cheaper than oil, but still more expensive than coal and gas. I’m not sure what you’re getting at though, looking at the price of existing installations is not sufficient to account for future costs. What we do know is that wind and solar are new technologies and costs have been dropping rapidly with increase in production. Carbon fuels meanwhile have remained historically the same inflation adjusted price for the last century.

A big flaw with most current models is that their learning curves for tech are either completely ignored, or are way too small to match empirical reality. Here's a popular news article about research using empirical modeling of the learning curves, which says that the models are overestimating the cost:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/the-decreasing-cost-...

And here's a podcast episode about it that goes into a lot more detail:

https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-159-the-cost-of-d...

However, if you're not willing to take the other link in a sibling comment because it comes from an investor, I'm not sure what you consider to be a neutral source.

I would say that what's actually wild are the "accepted" models from the IEA, which have been catastrophically wrong year after year because they encapsulate "common sense" of the industry instead of data based methods:

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/06/iea-gets-hilariously-sl...

Again, as with the sibling comment, I would like to see empirical data on the cost viability of existing solar and wind installations. Most of the links posted so far seem to present projections about the future, which seems to imply that wind and solar tend to be higher cost today.

Empirically, building more of these technologies reduces the costs of these technologies. This is often called Wright's Law across a wide range of industries. These links look at real data for this.

If you are unwilling to accept this premise, of changing costs, then there is no neutral or accurate source that you will accept. Which is kind of what I expected when I responded, so I regret taking the time. I hope other readers of these comments can benefit from the knowledge, however.

> given current events

The sun, the wind and gravity got really really expensive this year.

Thank god for variable priced fossil fuel inputs that saved us from having really expensive electricity bills.

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