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Re:SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia plan to spend $200B build... by joshhart on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:18AM (#16704659)
According to Wikipedia the worldwide consumption of electricity is about 21k Tera watt hours. That's 21,000,000 gw so it's .001% right? Also I think cost is now about a quarter per watt
Re:SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia plan to spend $200B build... by philipkglass on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:45AM (#16704779)
A terawatt hour is a unit of energy. A terawatt, or a gigawatt, is a unit of power. To estimate how many TWh can be generated annually from 200 GW of solar capacity, we need two more numbers:

- The number of hours in a year.

- The percentage of nameplate capacity that the system can be expected to produce on average, e.g. the capacity factor.

There are 8760 hours in a year. A solar PV system in a sunny region may have an annualized capacity factor of 25%. (Installations in really sunny regions may achieve upward of 30%, and Saudi Arabia certainly has a lot of sun, but dust offsets some of the benefits of sunny deserts.)

200 * 8760 * 0.25 = 438000 gigawatt hours of electricity generated per year, e.g. 438 TWh, or about 2% of present annual global electricity generation of 21,000 TWh.

Re:SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia plan to spend $200B build... by bumblebeard on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:32AM (#16704722)
Watts measure power, Watt hours measure energy. A 200 GW power plant could output a maximum of ~1,700 TWh in a year which is about 8% of 21,000 TWh.