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This has boondoggle written all over it; however, I'm glad ridiculously rich people are willing to waste their money on it - it should be a great learning exper
by tryitnow 9y ago
This has boondoggle written all over it; however, I'm glad ridiculously rich people are willing to waste their money on it - it should be a great learning experience for the engineers and other workers involved.
It's a likely boondoggle because solar is still a changing technology, committing to build something now risks being locked into technologies that may be woefully out of date by 2030.
Just imagine if someone tried this 12 years ago - the plant would be coming online today probably with technology that is a lot less efficient than it could have been had they waited.
Nonetheless, I have to say I am inspired by Softbank's and the MBS's vision, good for them.
- sametmax 9y agoOn the other hand, you can wait like that for a very long time, and you have a problem to solve now.
- Someone 9y agoI don’t think this is a “all in from the get go” like investment, where, once you started, you either run through your original plan or abandon it completely. If solar cells become more efficient during construction, they will be able to switch to using them for new construction (they probably won’t even have a choice, as they won’t be able to buy the old ones anymore) Also, at that scale, they will be replacing stuff continuously even before they are finished building it. Google and Amazon aren’t running outdated computers in their ten year old data centers, either.