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.
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.