Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvmfjvfjvf | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to what you may think, wind and solar are not cheap. Land is very expensive. You would even increase housing costs due to land being used for energy instead of new home construction.

View on HN

Nope. Do the math. Even if you rented prime farmland for solar instead of scrubland, it’s still super cheap. Like 1% of the money you’d make. Farmland is around $125/acre-year, you get about 350 MWh per acre in a year, and so even if you only got paid like 4¢/kWh, the rent would still be like 1% of your costs.

No, it's not. The Altamont wind farm on hugely expensive Bay Area real estate can power under 50,000 homes. For comparison a coal or nuclear plant of 1/1000th the size can power 1 million homes. You are not factoring in opportunity costs. The price of land is real and it is not cheap.

There is tons of land to the east of the Altamont pass that doesn’t have any homes on it, nor any wind farms there. That part of the region isn’t land constrained, especially when the wind farms were constructed in the 80’s.

I literally showed you how it’s cheap even if you use agricultural land. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an airplane, but the vast majority of our country is empty or farmland. It’s just a tiny crust of civilization surrounded by wilderness and farms. And typically, a solar farm is going to have less impact than intensive agriculture. In the United States, land cost for utility scale solar is just not a real constraint at all.

The hilarious thing about his argument is that it rules out agriculture also. I guess we can stop worrying about all this since we've already all starved to death.

Electricity costs are calculated in currency per kWh generated. And on that front, wind solar beat everything else since at least 2018, by far. And those costs for solar continue to drop every year.

Again you're not factoring in opportunity costs. If you had 100,000 homes built on Altamont instead of wind farms that would generate a lot more tax revenue (and jobs and obviously homes) than the "savings" you would get from a wind farm.

Because whomever bought the landnto built a wind farm on it was, for some reason, too stupid to consider the land cost in his business case? It might be near SV, but not everyone is doing their cost calculation like the latest food delivery VC bavked start-up.

Nor is the entity who sold the land. So, if there ever was any opportunity cost involved, it is already factored in.

Well the wind farms are being subsidized by the federal government and they have likely entered into decades long lease agreements. Much of the land is also zoned for agricultural use. This prevents landowners from building housing on it.

This might be a crazy idea, but what if we put the housing underneath the solar? One might even call it putting the solar on top of the houses?

This could make sense in Arizona not Seattle. You would have to build more solar farms in Arizona.

It works just fine in Seattle - I speak from personal experience! Rooftop solar is popular here. Direct sunlight is not a requirement; PV works fine in overcast conditions, and cooler temperatures offer an efficiency advantage.

Seattle is already mostly hydro, so building solar there would be a bit silly

Boston, NYC, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Anchorage, Portland, Rochester, Syracuse, Erie, etc.

Take your pick. There are a ton of American cities where solar does not work like how you imagine

If I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to find the optimal renewable + storage solution to provide a constant power output in New York state, the solution includes plenty of solar (and comes in cheaper than nuclear likely would). It also includes hydrogen though, so it would likely make sense to make some of that hydrogen elsewhere and send it to NY by pipeline.

You do know that electricity, at least im countries with a power grid actually deserving that name, so maybe not the US, can be transmitted over quite long ditsances?

Why would there be competition between solar/wind and housing for land? For what reason would you need (or even desire) to locate solar farms and wind turbines on the edge of large cities?

Wind farms are built on top of land that could be used to build more housing. There's a huge wind farm in the the Bay Area (Altamont Pass) that is used for wind farms that could have been used to build a ton of more houses.

There is plenty of land nowhere near cities if that is your concern. If housing could even be built there at all given the terrain.

There are very few on most similar terrain in the Bay Area and there are no wind farms blocking development there. Why haven't houses been built?

This is not quite true. The biggest American wind farm (Altamont Pass) is right next to Silicon Valley in the Bay Area. The 2-9 ones are between 20-50 miles from cities. You mention these "rural" areas as if nothing would be built there. These areas are typically developed over 10-50 years, just like the Bay Area when that wind farm was built.

LOL, yeah, housing prices in the Texas (ex|sub)urbs are high because the wind farms are squeezing the home builders out. Where do you live again?

I'm curious if you've ever been to the Bay Area and noticed the huge Altamont wind farm that could have a million homes on it.

Yep, not a resident though. There seem to be a constant stream of articles about housing issues in the Bay Area, don't recall any attributing the issue to wind farms, but I'd be interested to read any I might have missed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com