Why clean energy is now expanding even when fossil fuels are cheap

[FBaggins]

17. Many posts are gone, but Google still reflects eight or nine instances

I'm pretty sure that qualifies as "several".

I got tangled in the definition of GWp and in that one instance used it as "production" instead of "peak"

Nope. It was repeated over and over (and defended a couple years later). About a month and a half after the original post (or at least the oldest that I can now find), you said "If we can get 1000GWp of solar manufacturing capacity built by 2020, we have climate change licked."
(http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.phpaz=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=296715&mesg_id=296889)

For the record, the 1000GWp was a benchmark that many thought we'd need to hit...

You were asked multiple times for a single source claiming that. If you've ever found one... by all means provide it.

The bold text should have read: ...panels will produce the equivalent electricity of about 7 or 8 large nuclear power plants.

Try comparing their actual production over the last five years to this claim. As predicted at the time... it was nonsense (even when adjusting for "unit" rather than "plant&quot .

Within ten years it is hoped/expected/thought that cumulative global solar installed capacity will hit 1000GWp.

Even the corrected claim is nonsense. Note that we're roughly five years into this ten year period... and hoped to hit 1/5th of this total by the end of last year. There's precisely zero chance of five consecutive years of installs that each top all solar installs worldwide to date.

Why didn't you point out the error at the time? The innocence of the mistake - along with the mistake itself - was pretty obvious.

It was indeed obvious (to one of us)... and I did point it out multiple times. The only one I can find today was "And for the record... I think that the 1,000 GW figure is not an annual manufacturing goal, but a total INSTALLED label capacity goal... and for much longer than 10 years from now." and "And the notion that you even think it's possible to get to 1,000 GWp annually in ten years just shows how disconnected you've become from reality."

The real question is why you weren't listening and instead repeated the claim over and over again.

Really, what specifically is your purpose in going back 4 years to highlight this mistake?

I would think that's obvious. It was an example of your ongoing overexuberance in renewables projections and/or analysis. Other examples include the factory in Europe that produced parts of wind turbines yet you took their projected peak capacity (along with attractive capacity factors) and compared how much wind power would be produced due to that single factory to a number of reactors. Or the claim that multiple utility-scale wave power plants would be in existence by about now because the technology was all "off the shelf" technology. Or the claim that "rock batteries" were just around the corner for the same reason.

For the record... solar manufacturers still suffer under too much overcapacity (and China still hasn't produced 35GW of solar units in a year) and new manufacturing capacity is shifting to other countries (including, surprisingly, the US) and China's factories would be in truly desperate circumstances were it not for the government soaking up incredible levels of output (on edit - I think they're running ~60% of capacity with the government buying up roughly half of that amount to keep the companies solvent). The wind turbine factory never reached production and closed down a couple years ago. We've made very little progress on wave generation (specifically because the technology was far from off-the-shelf), and the designer of the rock batteries has substantially changed their design (though I like what I'm seeing).