[Robotbeat]

Nope. Do the math. Even if you rented prime farmland for solar instead of scrubland, it’s still super cheap. Like 1% of the money you’d make. Farmland is around $125/acre-year, you get about 350 MWh per acre in a year, and so even if you only got paid like 4¢/kWh, the rent would still be like 1% of your costs.

[jvmfjvfjvf]

No, it's not. The Altamont wind farm on hugely expensive Bay Area real estate can power under 50,000 homes. For comparison a coal or nuclear plant of 1/1000th the size can power 1 million homes. You are not factoring in opportunity costs. The price of land is real and it is not cheap.

[ec109685]

There is tons of land to the east of the Altamont pass that doesn’t have any homes on it, nor any wind farms there. That part of the region isn’t land constrained, especially when the wind farms were constructed in the 80’s.

[Robotbeat]

I literally showed you how it’s cheap even if you use agricultural land. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an airplane, but the vast majority of our country is empty or farmland. It’s just a tiny crust of civilization surrounded by wilderness and farms. And typically, a solar farm is going to have less impact than intensive agriculture. In the United States, land cost for utility scale solar is just not a real constraint at all.

[pfdietz]

The hilarious thing about his argument is that it rules out agriculture also. I guess we can stop worrying about all this since we've already all starved to death.

[hef19898]

Electricity costs are calculated in currency per kWh generated. And on that front, wind solar beat everything else since at least 2018, by far. And those costs for solar continue to drop every year.

[jvmfjvfjvf]

Again you're not factoring in opportunity costs. If you had 100,000 homes built on Altamont instead of wind farms that would generate a lot more tax revenue (and jobs and obviously homes) than the "savings" you would get from a wind farm.

[hef19898]

Because whomever bought the landnto built a wind farm on it was, for some reason, too stupid to consider the land cost in his business case? It might be near SV, but not everyone is doing their cost calculation like the latest food delivery VC bavked start-up.

Nor is the entity who sold the land. So, if there ever was any opportunity cost involved, it is already factored in.

[jvmfjvfjvf]

Well the wind farms are being subsidized by the federal government and they have likely entered into decades long lease agreements. Much of the land is also zoned for agricultural use. This prevents landowners from building housing on it.