> You are aware that not every place in the world has the weather found in California, yes?
Your info is sorely out of date. Modern solar panels can operate in cloudy conditions. And they operate better when they are cool. The UK is installing solar all over the place. Solar panels operate on daylight, not direct sunlight.
Cleve Hill solar farm in the UK was approved in 2020 and will generate 350MW. The idea that solar is only feasible is sunny climates is frankly absurd.
What's the capacity factor for Cleve Hill? We don't have to guess, it's in this document:
https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/wp-conten...
It's 10.8%.
This is a 35MW plant. Oh, but it has batteries I hear you saying!
Doesn't matter. It will generate 35MW-years per year. Batteries, at best, mean wasting less of it.
Meanwhile, a 350MW nuclear plant has a capacity factor of 90%, most of the loss being conversion to AC, with a bit of downtime.
So that would deliver 315MW-years of energy, per year.
Nothing you mentioned supports the false claim that you need sunny weather for solar to be a viable source of energy.
Not to mention that several sources say it will generate 350 MW of power. And that it will power about 100,000 homes. I'm pretty sure that's not happening with a 35MW plant.
That doesn't speak well of either your perspicacity nor judgement. Good luck.
"This is a project that will generate up to 350MW of clean renewable electricity to power over 91,000 homes"
Considering this solar instalation is a for-profit venture in cloudy UK and will reduce carbon output without subsidies, I'm calling it a win whether it powers 1000 houses or 350,000.
91,000 homes would be about 91,000 * 3,000 kWh / year = 273 TWh / year. You need an average of 31 MW over a year to produce this, which roughly tracks 350 MW with ~10% capacity factor. So over a year this seems to be correct.
On a day to day basis however the project only includes 700 MWh of storage. That's about 24h of the electricity consumption of 91,000 homes. A single cloudy winter day and those batteries are empty. So if you look at shorter time periods than a full year there's a huge variation in how many households can actually be reliably powered by such an installation. It's likely somewhere between 1,000 (several days of cloudy winter) and 350,000 homes (sunny summer).
> It's likely somewhere between 1,000 (several days of cloudy winter)
How do you figure? Solar technology is moving so rapidly you can't even look at the efficiency of the panels from a few years ago to do the math. Is the 1,000 number a guess or did you do the math for the 900,000 some panels they will have at that site?
Your original comment was wildly correct. I do admire your effort to correct an Internet.
I do wonder why so many people seem to be so tragically misinformed about the topic of power generation. It is a complicated subject, but the information is available, and yet simple facts seem to be so wilfully ignored. Where is the canonical resource for well written truthful FAQs about power generation?
This year, for instance, the majority of Chinese manufacturing capacity, the largest manufacturers (and possibly the majority of panels manufactured, although data are sparse) have moved from p-PERC to TOPCon, precisely because of the latter's better low-light performance (and lesser reasons). p-PERC dominated from about 2015 to 2021 (after polycrys, a-Si, CdTe thin-film and CI(G)S lost the growth race). Some manufacturers are moving to heterojunction instead. HJT also does better than p-PERC. So we are moving on from p-PERC apparently.
Also this year, a large minority, or the majority (again public data are rare) of panels are bifacial, in order to capture light reflected off the ground (snow, in particular) to improve winter performance and low sun angle performance/capacity factor.
Clouds and winter are not PV killers.
Hope is not a plan.
As Germany is going to find out this winter.
> As Germany is going to find out this winter.
Germany's problems have more to do with the non-viability of relying on Russian gas than on anything else. You can predict things like the Ukraine war as well as you can predict an earthquake at Fukushima.
There was no such claim.
Again, I think we're done here.
Anyone can read to the top of thread and see that you are wrong about what started the discussion.
Things are stalled in nuclear. Hope is, indeed, not a plan.
A plan is a plan, and PV has one. Wind has another.
Straightforward engineering optimisations, hundreds of them, all adding up, with few political considerations. (I won't say no political considerations, because there are always people who will cut off their nose to spite their face.)
Nuclear has hope and promises.
Well, it doesn't, because they've shut all their nuclear plants down.
That's rather the point, yo.
1. If you mean solar thermal panels, then yes, PVs are better in cloudy conditions. Solar thermal panels only collected the specular light from the sun, not the diffuse light from the rest of the sky.
Vertical bifacial modules produce significantly less energy overall, but more during morning/evening and during snow or cloudy conditions.
This latter fact combined with the much lower module costs mean that -- in practical terms -- they perform vastly better in cloudy conditions.
"Can operate" is a different thing from "can operate at the claimed efficiency".
You're saying that modern solar panels produce the same output on cloudy days that they do on sunny ones?
I don't think so.
> Cleve Hill solar farm in the UK was approved in 2020 and will generate 350MW.
At what cost per MWh, including government subsidies?
Who said that?
> At what cost per MWh, including government subsidies?
No government subsidies.
Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy over the Vogtle nuclear plant in discussion. The U.S. government has given $8.3 billion of loan guarantees to help finance construction of the Vogtle reactor.
So yeah, at what cost per MWh is a great question. Someone should do the math. And the math should include the loan guarantees and the bankruptcy costs.
The original poster.
One of the followups has pointed out that in the REAL WORLD, a major solar plant is only expected to produce about 10% of its nameplate capacity.
While nuclear plants routinely produce 90% of their nameplate capacities.
Companies investing in large scale commercial solar plants in the cloudy UK at the north of the planet, for profit, and without subsidies, proves that this is true.
Meanwhile Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy trying to finish the Vogtle nuclear power plant in discussion. 90% of nameplate capacity doesn't mean much at all if you can't afford to finish building the thing.
Tell you what: get back to me when someone actually builds one of your fantasy solar power plants at a competitive cost (which will involve multiplying the nameplate capacity by 9).
But we need to keep civilization running until then. Sorry.
Hey! I'm already back with proof positive results!
NextEra energy has installed over 45,500Mw of renewable energy and their earnings per share are 1.30. This all happened while the latest nuclear build put the builder into bankruptcy, yo!
The are - get this - the world's largest utility company.
Their future plans do include continuing running existing nuclear plants. But get this: it does not include building new nuclear. It does include building LOADS of new solar.
Lots more where NextEra came from.
> But we need to keep civilization running until then. Sorry.
We are. 1/5 of all the solar installed in the US was installed just last year. Your beloved nuclear is slowing fading into history while solar plants go up everywhere you look. Sorry! Even France knows the deal and will rely far less on nuclear in the coming years.
Didn't you say we were done here? Twice? What happened?
Built by elves, perhaps, like the fairytale about the shoemaker?
Sorry, no. Replacing any significant portion of the grid with solar is going to take many years. More likely decades.
> In that time we can immediately begin producing clean power at least during the day
During the day, in the summer, when it's not cloudy, perhaps.
You are aware that not every place in the world has the weather found in California, yes?