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To put the realities of PV capacity from your first footnote into perspective: Germany with 53GW of solar capacity and 8GW nuclear only produced 50.4 TWh of ele

• kragen 6y ago
  Yes, absolutely! I think it helps a lot to restate quantities of the same dimension in the same units—if you measure steel beams in meters and a bridge in feet, it becomes needlessly difficult to understand the relationship between them. It's unfortunately common practice) to report peak capacities in GW and actual yield in TWh/year. A TWh/year is about 114'079'550 watts, which seems like a terrible unit to me. If we do the unit conversion, Germany's 53GWp of solar capacity produced 5.75 GW in 02020, and its 8GWp of nuclear produced 7.34 GW. This works out to capacity factors of 10.8% for solar and 91.7% for nuclear, which are not terribly surprising. Wind typically has a higher capacity factor, but I calculate China's wind capacity factor as only 22% (405 TWh/year = 46 GW on nameplate capacity of 209 GWp for 02019), well below the typical 40%. I think solar is more interesting because the total available resource is orders of magnitude larger and the hardware lasts many decades, but wind is certainly cheaper.