> And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget.

All projects do, including wind and solar.

--- start quote ---

Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two years behind schedule

Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,

--- end quote ---

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-projec...

> And realizing ten times the current building capacity for nuclear plants

How much do we need to overbuild wind and solar?

Test comment

Nuclear power projects are not just over-budget, they start off with a budget of a couple of billions, whereas individual solar or wind power projects are way smaller and therefor carry less of a risk. Nuclear power requires a huge financial backing from a single entity (even it is "fed" by multiple sources). Almost always, the risk is carried by society, the profit, if any is gobbled up by some corporation.

There is no need to "overbuild" wind or solar. There has never been any illusion those sources will produce at 100% capacity all the time. There will eventually be energy storage to level out the peaks, but most countries still have years to build up to the point where this is necessary.

Also, the decommissioning costs are really high, are usually not factored into the investment and often have to be absorbed by the state.

Current calculations from German decommissioning projects point at 10-20 billion per plant.

Test

> Nuclear power has high upfront investments, always. And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget.

Which grid-scale solar projects have gone into production on schedule and under budget? Are there any?

Yes, it's actually pretty common. See comparisons across generating technologies in "An international comparative assessment of construction cost overruns for electricity infrastructure" [1].

Here's what the researchers found for solar (section 3.4):

Thirty-nine solar PV and CSP power plants, representing 2374 MW of installed capacity and $16.5 billion worth of investment, were analyzed. (These are utility-scale infrastructure projects, thus they do not include the familiar rooftop solar collectors on buildings or residential configurations.) These projects as a class actually came in $4.2 million less than budgeted, or $200,000 less than expected per project. These solar systems had the lowest average cost escalation per reference class (1.3 percent), the least time overruns (an average of 2 months ahead of schedule), and the lowest standard deviation for amount of overruns and time overruns. They also had the largest total amount of cost underruns, with the entire class of projects costing $163.9 million less than budgeted, though some of this may be explained by dramatic reductions in cost over the past 4 years. As Table 5 indicates, only 3 facilities had overruns greater than $50 million and only 3 facilities had cost overruns greater than 30%, all of which were CSP facilities rather than large-scale solar PV apparatuses.

Here are a few solar projects that outperformed in recent years:

O'Brien Solar Farm in Wisconsin, completed in 2021, on time and under budget:

https://www.boldt.com/project/edf-renewables-obrien-solar-fa...

Mount Signal 3 in California, completed in 2018 ahead of schedule:

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/12/8minutenergy-c...

Sun Streams 2 in Arizona, completed under budget and ahead of schedule in 2021:

https://www.enr.com/articles/55112-best-project-energy-indus...

Hillston solar farm in Australia, reached full commercial operation in 2022 ahead of schedule:

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/hillston-solar-farm-mb24...

Kuala Ketil Solar Farm in Malaysia, completed in 2019 ahead of schedule:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/09/12/50-mw-solar-park-come...

[1] https://www.qualenergia.it/sites/default/files/articolo-doc/...

1) None of these are grid scale. 2) All of them are heavily subsidized.

The closest I see in that list is Mount Signal 3, which comes in at about 1/3 the capacity of a typical grid-scale generating station (1/6 if you account for the fact that it's producing zero power half the time, on average). It also chews up nearly 2,000 acres of land.

Hillston is 120 megawatts. Sun Streams 2 is 200 megawatts. Mount Signal 3 is 328 megawatts. The coal fired generating plants that retired in the US in the past decade were often smaller than that.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7290

The table above shows that the coal generators that retired between 2009 and 2011 had an average size of 59 megawatts (MW). By contrast, the average size of a coal-fired plant planned for retirement between 2012 and 2015 is 154 MW, more than twice the average size of the units retired during the 2009-2011 period.

In 2022, coal fired generators had a capacity factor of ~48% in the United States:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Photovoltaic solar farms attained ~25% capacity factor in 2022:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

So as a rough guide you can estimate that a solar farm will generate about as much electricity annually as a coal plant with half the nameplate capacity. The Signal 3 facility would roughly match a 164 megawatt coal generator for annual generation.

We were comparing nuclear and solar, not coal and solar.

164 megawatts (328 / 2, to account for the fact that solar plants are offline a minimum of half the time) is not anywhere in the same league as nuclear power plant, which are typically in the 2-3 gigawatt range, with modern large-scale plants producing 6-8 gigawatts.

The Mount Signal 3 plant also used up 2,000 acres (800 hectares of Imperial Valley farm land.