Those are nuclear-sized dollar numbers. I don't know of any solar PV farm that has been built in a single $3 billion phase. Flexible scaling is one of the big a

Those are nuclear-sized dollar numbers. I don't know of any solar PV farm that has been built in a single $3 billion phase. Flexible scaling is one of the big advantages of PV projects over other types of electricity generation projects. There are economies of scale as solar projects go up to (IIRC) 20 megawatts, but above 20 MW costs per unit are pretty flat. So investors can take a much smaller risk with e.g. a $50 million project of 25 megawatts, see how it performs over a few years, and invest in larger projects (or a larger number of tens-of-megawatts projects) if they like the results. 5 years is also an unusually long timeline for constructing a solar PV project. The largest PV project in the US, the 579 megawatt Solar Star in California, was completed in 3.5 years. It also began supplying (partial) power to the grid about a year after construction started. Since a big PV project is practically a bunch of little projects tiled together on the same site, energy payback and financial payback on a big PV project can begin well before construction officially completes. That's in contrast to big "chunky" generating investments like a traditional storage-backed hydroelectric dam, or a nuclear reactor, where you have to build in large increments and can't turn on parts of the plant as you finish them. If small nuclear reactors ever get commercialized -- and I hope they do -- they too should offer more tolerable financial/schedule risk than today's gigawatt-plus reactor designs.