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Comment by cheunste | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you one area in renewables that's NOT winning. Offshore. In the industry, there was some talk about how GE is pulling out of the offshore wind turbine market. Sucks to be wind farms that were built using those GE turbines.

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Offshore’s doing fairly well globally, but I’m not sure how much of an export market GE has, and in the short term ol’ minihands has wrecked it in the US. Again, however, he won’t last forever.

Also not winning:

‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’

The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/05/worlds-largest-solar...

Do you understand the difference between solar thermal and photovoltaic?

You missed the point.

It doesn't matter if they used Plutonium solar panels. It was over hyped and made tons of promises and then massively underdelivered and now has to be decommissioned, at a huge cost to tax payers.

The point is that it’s as relevant to a conversation about photovoltaics as hydrogen is to a conversation about EVs.

That is not the largest solar plant (I’m guessing the article was written by our good friends the magic robots); there’s one with almost 10x the nameplate output in China, though likely more in reality, as concentrated solar thermal plants don’t work properly. It’s the largest concentrated solar thermal plant; it’s a dead-end technology (it looked plausible in the 90s when PV tech was expected to progress far less quickly than it actually did). You might as well claim that cars are dead on the basis that Wankel engines were a failure.

Offshore is certainly winning in the UK and around the North Sea

And it's cheaper than coal in China and lets them put generation near the populated coast.

And linking the two the Chinese Mingyang Smart Energy just announced an up to $2 Billion investment in a wind turbine factory in the UK.

Terrible for the US, and it means that we will lose out on yet more of the new energy economy.

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