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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

> GPs link doesn't even show what was claimed ("The other 3 have needed costly maintenance").

> complete with a retrofitted wet mate connection system, which more than halves the costs of future turbine recoveries and deployments."

Why do they need recoveries if not for maintenance? Why did they need to cut the cost of maintenance if no costly maintenance were needed?

> after being out of the water for upgrade and maintenance work."

How is this not literally validating GPs comment?

Anyone can say "the new ones won't need maintenance and the only reason we took them out was to improve them", but they could've worked on better ones and deployed them without removing existing ones. Removing existing ones mean they broke. So until the new ones last as long, GPs analysis is the correct one.

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> Why do they need recoveries if not for maintenance?

Upgrades. Was already answered.

> Why did they need to cut the cost of maintenance if no costly maintenance were needed?

To improve the ROI. If maintenance is needed, it will be cheaper going forward. How often the average turbine will require maintenance is harder to determine based on the information available. We know it might be somewhere between a few years and ~6 years.

> How is this not literally validating GPs comment?

It does not say anything about maintenance being required or costly.

> Anyone can say "the new ones won't need maintenance and the only reason we took them out was to improve them", but they could've worked on better ones and deployed them without removing existing ones.

That requires more investment (the things ain't cheap), and it does not show whether successful maintenance is possible or how expensive/cumbersome that maintenance would be, which are very important pieces of information for determining ROI.

If they didn't need maintenance why upgrade them? You didn't address that part of my comment. You can put upgrades on new ones that you'll deploy and track performance of each deployed cohort. You only go and remove already deployed ones if you really have to.

>If they didn't need maintenance why upgrade them?

We don't know, but there are other reasons besides maintenance and it is a huge unfounded assumption to say that is the only reason. Upgrading an existing installation for better performance is likely orders of magnatude less expensive than building additional units, building the archor points, and emplacing them, so it could have been getting more data out of less budget.

They may not have permits/authorization for additional locations yet.

The upgrades may provide a significant ROI improvement and the only reason they didn't upgrade all of them was to leave one to look at long term reliability while sacrificing the improved ROI.

But fundamentally, we just don't know. While required maintenance is one possibility, it is by no means the only one.

as this seems test plant, research/testing seems also possible

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