'Wind theft': The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms

Re:'Wind theft': The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms by Dylan16807 on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @05:35AM (#44178854)

A couple farms that barely make profit are already going to be unattractive to investors. It really doesn't make much difference to future investment. There's not a massive sea change between 1% profit and 2% loss, they both suck. Investors are going to focus on the higher profit farms no matter what, ones that would still be positive if they lose 3%.

Other things can go right or wrong and change the numbers by a couple percent. That risk is pretty normal. It's not something wild.

And any farm that's already running or even half-built is still going to be finished and maintained and make as much power as it can. Once you already spent a big percent of the budget you're not getting it back, and the ROI on the remaining spending is very high.

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Re:'Wind theft': The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms by vlovich123 on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @03:51PM (#44184787)

The challenge is that your neighbor building a wind farm next to you changes your profitability. That uncertainty isn't priced in. I think you're really assuming someone here is saying "stop building wind farms" vs "this is a problem investors in the space will need to account for as this scales up more"

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Re:'Wind theft': The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms by Dylan16807 on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @04:23PM (#44185076)

I don't disagree with your description of the problem in this comment. But the OP was perfectly fine if it's just something "to account for" on the scale of 3%.

Your strong dismissal of OP, and talking about how it "could be the entire profit margin", made it sound a lot more serious than it is, and that's why I disagreed with how you were commenting earlier and posted a counterargument.

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