Brandenburg has a stupidly large amount of solar compared to a terrible amount of sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/...
Meanwhile the best location in Germany the south southern tip of Baden-Württemberg only has a relatively small fraction of their total installed solar. I haven’t worked out the exact numbers but they are something like 20+% less efficient than they could be. Granted they would need to build more power transmission lines but it’s a small county so such projects would be fairly cheap compared to the efficiency gain.
PS: May solar power plants on the US are over 30% capacity factor and the average is ~25%. We’re a long way from the equator. In a perfect location solar tracking PV should get around 40% capacity factor. You beat 1/pi because over the day an angled panel casts a wider shadow than the width of the panel.
prc's pv capacity factor is also around 10% last i checked, which is also absurdly low and suggests that they maybe aren't as capitalist as they seem in important respects (i'd be interested in updates)
by 'may' do you mean 'many'
it was easier to justify solar tracking (and concentrating solar, and nuclear) fifteen years ago when solar panels are expensive. but now you have to trade off twenty dollars in mechanical parts for tracking against 180 more peak watts of solar panels. with maintenance costs it's easy for the balance to come out in favor of a simpler system without tracking
Solar tracking makes more sense when you look at wholesale rates over a day. Peak demand prices start right as static solar production falls off so you would need batteries not just more solar panels to sell at those rates. On top of this costs like land, inverters, and wiring gets amaorterised across more hours of production.
Wholesale prices get influenced by the deployed solar power including rooftop solar. Which adds yet another dimension to these models.
two problems
one, pv modules are typically about a third of the cost of a utility-scale solar farm; things like installation labor and power electronics are also part of the cost. so roughly we should expect solar projects to cost about 80 cents per peak watt based on that number
two, that page ends in 02021, but pv module prices have fallen by about a third to half since the beginning of this year https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
in particular solarserver's 'mainstream' category was about 25 euro-cents throughout 02021 and is now at 19, 24% lower, and the lowest it's ever been
it seems like the price-fixing cartel announced at the beginning of 02019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... has finally collapsed
solarserver's 'low-cost' category is at the staggeringly low price of 11 euro-cents per peak watt; if the other costs didn't change, that would lower the solar plant cost from 80 cents to 65 cents or so per peak watt, though in fact they tend to increase somewhat because of the larger area of solar cells required to reach the same wattage (that's why the mainstream pv modules are more expensive)
a third problem is the capacity factor, tho; nuke plants typically run at about 90% capacity, while solar farms run at closer to 20%, because of problems such as night. in very polar countries like germany it's 10%. so 70 cents per nameplate watt works out to more like 3.5 dollars per delivered watt
which is still cheaper than 4.9 (or 5.4 dollars per delivered watt assuming that 90% capacity factor) but not implausibly cheaper anymore