= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nornagest comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (263)
Why isn't sea-based solar power more of a thing? Say you have a big barge of solar panels, soaking up energy and storing it in batteries. Then once in a while a transport ship takes the full batteries to land to be used, and returns some empty batteries to the barge.
I imagine in most places it'd be cheaper to buy an acre of land on the outskirts of town, or to rent an acre of otherwise unused rooftop from your local big-box store, than to build a barge with equivalent deck area; Wikipedia informs me for example that a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier has a deck area of only about six acres.
Land-based solutions also let you plug directly into the grid rather than futzing with also-expensive battery storage.
Opportunity cost. 15 years later that is suburbia. (And the current suburbia is a slum. Never buy a house unless you are 95% sure this won't happen!)
That should already be priced into the present value of the property. On the other hand, if you can see the land value going up, that'll have an effect on expected property tax rates; but that should be a relatively minor line item. And not all cities are expanding in that way; if you pulled this right now in the States, in fact, there's a good chance that the cheap land you're picking up would once have been intended for a subdivision before the bottom fell out of the housing market.
Meanwhile, the barge full of solar panels will probably have needed hull repairs at least once in those fifteen years, and its batteries (assuming lead-acid, which give the best energy-to-price ratio with current technology, and assuming a cycle per day) will have been replaced two or three times.
If you think that the land will be more valuable in a few decades, that is an argument for wanting to own it. If your solar adventures can pay for just the interest on what you bought the land for, then you have the upside of land speculation without the downside.