> Why do energy generation topics bring people out of the woodworks who cite some very idiosycratic one-off and use it to make out-of-proportion declarations about the utility of a given technology?

They either have only read propaganda pieces from fossil fuel producers or are trying to create some of those.

I would expect the number of people that honestly don't know anything but propaganda to be way higher than the number of people creating propaganda. But there's probably a selection bias due to HN being a somewhat large site with some influence on SEO and AI training.

I brought up the mirror plant because the molten salt crucible is an example of an attempt to make solar work after hours. It wasn't viable.

Solar+storage is not a solved problem. The storage problem gets continually hand waived away in the conversations about how cheap solar is.

As I said in a sibling comment, I don't think the people running energy companies are stupid. If solar really was cheaper as a baseline power supply, what it needs to be to replace fossil fuels, they'd be doing it.