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There's an interesting glut of wind power detractors in this thread right now. Not only that, they all come off quite aggressively for HN.
by Bjartr 7y ago
There's an interesting glut of wind power detractors in this thread right now. Not only that, they all come off quite aggressively for HN.
- concordDance 7y agoTo see why wind can't get much bigger without a giant breakthrough in storage see these graphs of power production and consumption: http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
- Bjartr 7y agoI don't see an obvious connection between those charts and why wind can't get much bigger. It just shows that wind is currently producing ~26% of the power demand. Would you mind spelling it out since it is not self-evident to me?
- concordDance 7y agoWind varies a lot, we're approaching the point where extra wind turbines will fail to displace other power source capacity (the only power source we can vary is natural gas, which can already get close to zero with our current wind capacity). A doubling of wind capacity will reduce how much gas we'd burn in total, but you'd really start to hit diminishing returns.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoAlmost all of them are now only visible to people with showdead on.
- danw1979 7y agoyeah they're attaching Bloomberg specifically in a couple of the posts too. I wonder if someone somewhere has a large vested interest in fossil fuels and is annoyed about the BNEF and Bloomberg's mostly positive reporting on renewables.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoI've noticed a few very pro-fossil comments in threads. I don't know if there are shills or if there are simply propagandist fossil fuel lovers? Is there any way to empirically study HN commenters? Data scrape + analyze?
- danw1979 7y agoI've been using "pro fossil / anti EV / global warming denial" as a pretty useful heuristic to filter the Great Comments Section of Real Life for a while now. Usually goes hand-in-hand with being a Leaver and general contrarian. To your point, I've found that petrolheads are pretty common even in tech.
- creaghpatr 7y agoPretty sure digging past comments goes against the guidelines. It's also a primitive an absolutist way of judging a comment (rather than on, say, its substance).
- WhompingWindows 7y agoWhat if the substance of the comment is just erroneous or poorly intention-ed? How am I supposed to tell if it's a paid corporate shill or a genuine fossil fuel lover?
- pstch 7y agoThe idea is to assume good faith. If it can't be done, I think not answering is the best course of action.
- mavhc 7y agoneed to get people to use petrol head to mean someone whose brain has been screwed up by pollution anyone got a contact at Marvel?
- pjc50 7y agoIt's a perfect topic for the "middlebrow dismissal". Contributors can start from a true-but-myopic fact, that renewables are intermittent. They can then deploy their biases that "everyone else is stupid and hasn't thought about this", and/or "everyone with the opposite opinion is a paid shill", and get very exercised about it. Global warming attracts a certain kind of "gotcha" nerd who will hunt for the one set of data that can be arranged to make it look not so bad while ignoring all the evidence on the other side of the scale. There's an entire site devoted to that (WUWT). Meanwhile there's a set of quietly competent engineers keeping the lights on and ignoring all this social media nonsense.