alt Hacker NewsSolar only works if you 1) live in a standalone house that 2) don't get tornadoes, typhoons, severe rainstorms or other disasters annually, and 3) they are installed on-prem, for off-grid capacities.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
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I live in a place that gets typhoons, but there's probably only one big enough to rip my panels off every once in 5 years. Still, you never know which one it will be and I don't look forward to having to taken mine inside for false alarms.
I've seen plenty of solar in areas that get hit by hurricanes or tropical cyclones. If your panels get blown to bits, you just put up new panels once the storm is over (or you know, take them down when the storm is forecasted)
That's a very narrow view of solar. Solar, like any other form of electricity, can be transmitted, even very large distances. There's no reason that places like the US Southwest can't generate a whole bunch of solar and export it to the national grid.
Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.
Interesting perspective. As someone who didn't even grow up in the US, I saw Sim City as a builder of relatively low density, hard zoning cities that had little to do with the high density I grew up in. The idea of commercial zones didn't even make sense to me, as in Spain, such thing doesn't exist. Need for traffic to get to the commercial zones made little sense.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.