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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Trying to minmax for the most cost effective renewable energy is fretting over spending nickles and dimes, while billionaires and megacorps are setting hundred dollar bills on fire. It's just not a productive place to be focusing your energy. We can afford both types of renewable energy, easily, we're just choosing to let others waste that money on garbage instead.

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It's not nickles and dimes. It's 5x more expensive than a conservative estimate on 700mw of wind or solar

> It's not nickles and dimes

Yes it is. So far, we've flushed enough money down the Iran war toilet to pay for ten of these, and there's no end in sight.

I call this the "bigger rat" argument.

The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.

The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.

Nah. Groups of people spending hours and hours debating whether it is smarter to buy the $1.95 or the $1.99 can of beans at the store is being silly. Just pick one. Or buy both! It's only two bucks and we spent $2,000 on flights to Europe last week.

What an absurd analogy. Of course it's worth spending time when deciding if billions of dollars are worth spending on something. It's worth entire individual lifetimes of effort if one can save that much money.

I identified ways to save 30 times that much money in this thread. It is more productive for you to focus your efforts there.

So, it's not going to cost $5B? Better inform those building it.

I just think it's silly to focus your efforts complaining about $5B being arguably somewhat inefficiently spent, versus hundreds of billions of dollars going straight into the garbage. There's far better things to focus on if you're concerned about money going to waste.

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