4 ms·

It's still a good thing, but isn't this misleading, since solar capacity would only be able to run 1/3 of the day-ish? Not sure about wind but again guessing it

• acdha 2y ago
  A third of the day is the winter solstice in fairly northerly latitudes. It’s better the rest of the year and the further south you go. The other thing to remember is that production and storage capacity are cheap to expand, so the better question is how often it’s the case that it’s dark at times of peak demand long enough to exhaust the grid storage capacity. Currently, that’ll be the case but I’d bet that a decade from now it’ll be much less common.
• duckmysick 2y ago
  Depending on the location, it's between 10-25%. The EIA data says it's around 25%. Wind is 35%, nuclear 92%, gas combined 58%, coal 40-50%, hydro 35-40%. As you can see, the capacity factor is not 100% for pretty much everything. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... Again, it all depends on the location. The US has a pretty high capacity factor for nuclear at over 90%, but the UK has it at 60-80%. Wind farms can go over 50%.
  • ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
    >Capacity factor: The ratio of the electrical energy produced by a generating unit for the period of time considered to the electrical energy that could have been produced at continuous full power operation during the same period. For solar/wind, this can literally never be 100%, or even close to it. For Coal/Nuclear/Gas it just comes down to maintenance duration.