Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power

Re:Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power by guerby on Monday July 27, 2020 @03:29PM (#23968530)

For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)

For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)

(1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor

(2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors

Not far from so-called "baseload"

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Re:Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power by martinald on Monday July 27, 2020 @03:38PM (#23968614)

That's quite misleading though. You can choose and schedule maintenance slots so they don't overlap all at once. Much harder to do with wind, hence you get 0MW output at some times, and massive overgenereration at once causing very negative electricity prices.

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Re:Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power by guerby on Monday July 27, 2020 @03:51PM (#23968729)

Yes and sometimes you have unplanned 680 MW to 0 with "baseload" nuclear:

https://www.energylivenews.com/2015/12/15/unplanned-shutdown...

Wind is intermitent but predictable. Loosing a turbine will not make the plant production go to zero (albeit loosing transmission will but same for all power plants).

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Re:Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power by cbmuser on Monday July 27, 2020 @07:01PM (#23970416)

One nuclear reactor out of 57. Wow, that's really a problem.

On the other hand, we have times in Germany when wind and solar are producing less than 1% of their installed power.

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