Thats 39% in ABQ of all hours in the year including night time.

Nobody is pretending that solar can provide electricity via night time generation. That's what storage systems and alternative sources are for.

The daylight story in ABQ is this:

> "It is sunny 78.9% of daylight hours. The remaining 21.1% of daylight hours are likely cloudy or with shade, haze or low sun intensity. "

http://www.albuquerque.climatemps.com/sunlight.php

Exactly - I've lived in AZ, FL, and spent a lot of time in SoCal. There is plenty of sun in those places.

If you can generate solar power 80% of daylight hours, that's a pretty good place to start.

Again, it's not an end-all-be-all solution. But you're talking about some very highly populated areas that could be using solar energy a hell of a lot more than they are now. Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, Dallas, LA, San Diego, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Las Vegas....that's a lot of places that could be utilizing solar power in a way that does move the needle. That's some 30-50 million people (if not slightly more) that could reduce their use of the federal grid in a measurable way.

I'm about 50 miles north of ABQ. I have a 6.7kW ground mount array. Using its rated output, and the average of 9.28 hours of sunshine per day, and no adjustment for hourly insolation variation I should get about 1.9MW a month. I actually get about 1MW, with not much variation from month to month.

I am optimistic that Santa Fe will soon see a new utility scale PV generation install that ought to generate power (with storage!) corresponding to roughly 1/3 of the city's residental use. The standard NIMBY-but-I'm-all-for-solar-have-some-myself crowd is out in force, however.

Some of these, maybe. It rains quite a lot in Miami and Houston -- Texas is big, and Houston is right on the Gulf Coast. It's more like New Orleans than it is Lubbock.

> Nobody is pretending that solar can provide electricity via night time generation.

The OP appeared to be suggesting exactly that.

It's like the (many) solar advocates who pretend that a solar nameplate capacity of x watts is equivalent to a conventional nameplate capacity of x watts, when in fact you're going to need 2x watts at a minimum, with an expensive storage system on top of that.

It's polite when reading something it's polite to interpret it in the way that makes the most sense.

Your last paragraph is something different -- that's not an implication that solar can generate at night. Note that levelized cost of energy does take into account that consideration (that why it's "levelized"). And renewables are trouncing new construction nuclear on that metric.