I don’t want to be rude but to say solar is ‘inefficient’ without qualification is essentially baseless ignorance or lying. PV/wind turbine efficiency and Rank

I don’t want to be rude but to say solar is ‘inefficient’ without qualification is essentially baseless ignorance or lying. PV/wind turbine efficiency and Rankine cycle efficiency are basically entirely different concepts physically and economically. Highly efficient rankine plants might turn 35% of the potential energy of expensive nuclear/coal fuel (which costs money) into electricity. In the process they produce waste heat and waste (dealing with those things is typically kicked down the road). Solar turns 20% of something that is free (being pointed at the sun modulo land use) into electricity with zero waste and zero additional waste heat. How is that inefficient (even if it were half that)? You can and should say lots of things about scale or nighttime but none of those have to do with prime mover efficiency. Now consider economic efficiency. The denominator of economic efficiency for solar/wind is financing charges and the numerator is multiplied by a lower capacity factor whereas for everything else the denominator is financing charges plus fuel costs. Fuel costs are expensive and boom/bust volatile creating huge economic uncertainties. These uncertainties increase financing charges further reducing economic efficiency. This is before you get to waste or waste heat. I don’t think 100% solar is a realistic option but neither are baseless claims of inefficiency.