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7 tweets,
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To make amends for my snark yesterday with some content, here's a few selections from that @ManhattanInst paper and thread that contribute to its being a candidate for retraction:
1) Would you rather have a 25% efficient panel that costs $0.40/W to produce, or a 30% efficient panel that costs $10/W to produce? This physical limit is economically (almost) meaningless.
2) The US built ~27 GW of generation last year. Multiplying that by 30 years gives 810 GW, a little short of the current installed capacity of the US (~1100 GW). This tweet is not close to correct.
3) Let's grant that the capacity costs are roughly the same and that the 3x figure is correct. This "analysis" amounts to the claim: if we ignore most of the cost structure of thermal generation, then they are way cheaper than solar and wind. 
4) Making this comparison without considering the relative vulnerability of the two supply chains is, frankly, absurd.
There's some other interesting factoids in the thread and article, but these errors are so large that frankly I didn't spend much time with the rest. Some of the other comparisons seem fairly specious as well.
I actually agree with the author that 1) energy transition will be difficult and 2) there's a lot of bad analysis coming from wind and solar advocates as well, so I hope outfits like @ManhattanInst decide that they want to be useful contributors to this conversation.
