Top all-time · #12792
David Turver
Personal blog · davidturver.substack.comeconomicsscience
David Turver writes Eigen Values, a personal blog at davidturver.substack.com about economics and science. Since 2025, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Turver's Substack for posts on energy economics, covering nuclear and renewables, energy return on investment, levelised cost and material intensity. Comments cite the posts as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Fundamental analysis of energy policy and Net Zero, with occasional forays into other subjects.
What Hacker News says?
> Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed That is just economics. The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand. As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*. Overcapacity means that the price of elect…
Comment linking /p/another-record-year-cfd-subsidies-2025
on “Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants”By far the most common PV systems are single-junction monocrystalline silicon. These have had pretty decent ERoEI for many years (9–10 according to https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67901.pdf , but the energy required for PV modules has dropped precipitously since then) and don't use any rare-earth minerals. Wind turbines have typically had even higher ERoEI (15–20 according to https://davidturver.substack.com/p/er…
Comment linking /p/eroei-eroi-of-onshore-offshore-wind-power
on “Thermoelectric Solar Panel”>LCOE Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead. https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-en...
Comment linking /p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-energy-models-junk
on “Canada is looking to build up to 10 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years”Hail to a fellow nuclear enthusiast. Personally I don't prefer molten salt designs because of two reasons: 1. Moving highly radioactive and quite corrosive liquid, without failure and leaks, around is a bit of a headache. Also maintenance of such machines is difficult. These are technical problems, which could be solved. 2. Because many molten salt reactor designs require online reprocessing, this could be a limitin…
Comment linking /p/material-intensity-electricity-generation
on “Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens”https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr... https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in... https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the...
Comment linking /p/material-intensity-electricity-generation
on “Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops”He explains on his website where he gets his data from. He gets it from The Low Carbon Contracts Company... y'know: the firm who is the actual counterparty to the CFDs and so should probably know the actual sums of cash being moved - and in which direction. His January article: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/record-january-cfd-subsid... LCCC's relevant data page: https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-c…
Comment linking /p/record-january-cfd-subsidies-in-2026
on “Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables”> Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation Post privatization domestic gas production rose 900%. Increasing supply = cheaper prices. Prices were low and stable at the time compared to today: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist po…
Comment linking /p/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-high
on “Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables”You can compare material intensity of different electricity generation technologies. https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr... According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
Comment linking /p/material-intensity-electricity-generation
on “Miscellanea: The War in Iran”