3 ms·
That's a serious overestimate. Figuring a 90% capacity factor for the reactor and 20% for the solar installation, it's 1005MW delivered power for the former and
by samatman 3y ago
That's a serious overestimate. Figuring a 90% capacity factor for the reactor and 20% for the solar installation, it's 1005MW delivered power for the former and 151MW delivered for the latter. That's 15% of one reactor, or put another way, it would take about six and a half of these solar installations to provide the same power as one reactor.
- loeg 3y agoMy impression (trying to read charitably) was that the 756MW figure included some capacity factor, if an extremely optimistic one. (For the nuke, a reasonable capacity factor of 95% of 1100W is still more or less 1100W.) Of course you are correct if the stated figure is maximum output of the solar farm.
- samatman 3y agoI've never seen solar installations reported as anything other than nameplate. I don't like it. I do like renewable power, but this kind of puffery makes people think that we're right on the verge of building an all-renewable electrical grid. Which we are not. We could have a zero-emissions electrical grid in ten years, by embracing a nuclear baseline, putting in a bunch of solar and wind where it makes sense, and adding some battery storage to soak up the intermittency of the latter. But when people read solar by the nameplate, they think it's 7x cheaper than it is, and try to compare that number to nuclear, rather than the actual one.