[thewopr]

I really wish there was much better details on costs on such large public projects (and institutions). Between the extreme costs of public works like these, healthcare, college education, there is a cost disease that needs to be figured out and addressed.

> More granularity is needed.

I feel like one big step forward on that would be requiring the disclosure of detailed budgets and expenses for all such semi-regulated institutions/projects receiving large portions of their budgets from public funding.

[cwal37]

At a previous job my first project was building a webscraper and some processing tools to pull down every application for preliminary permit ever filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a pumped storage plant.

The basis for this was two-fold, first, to get some kind of backing of what the potential supply might look like based on developer assumptions up to that point in time, second (and more germane to this discussion) to pull out every cost characteristics we could find in order to build a more robust set of cost models and cost prediction tools than had existed up to that point. Hydro costs are extremely site specific, so this is typically an onerous process.

I suppose the kicker here is that I was at a national lab and nominally employed by the Department of Energy, and they has such a sub-optimal grasp of hydropower that we were in the process of writing the first big national report on the resource in a long time[1]. Now hydro's also part of NREL's annual technology baselines[2], which was similarly fun to work on.

[1] https://energy.gov/eere/water/articles/hydropower-vision-new...

[2] https://atb.nrel.gov/

[mastratton3]

I've been thinking about this for a while actually. A lot of the data is available but generally requires going through FOIA which is difficult to do at scale.