TWENTY NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS - Fifty Percent of the nation's energy needs.

[kristopher]

26. Not so. What is misleading is to make "capacity factor" seem more important than it is.

The solar installations put out an amount of power that would have required 20 nuclear plants - period. You could not have done it with 2-3 nuclear plants no matter how hard you ran them; and talking about capacity factor doesn't change that. The observation in the op is accurate.

Clear enough?

What you are trying to reframe is called "the baseload myth" which proposes (with absolutely no proof) that the most effective, least expensive way to deliver energy to the end user is by building large centralized units that run as much as possible.

It simply isn't true. It is the system we presently have, but that system is an artifact of decisions made when external costs of energy were not considered and fossil fuels were thought to be a great boon to humankind. The ability to run 80% of the time isn't a technical necessity, it is an economic characteristic that forms the backbone of one possible grid configuration. The alternative is a distributed renewable grid; in the long run the change will provide us a cheaper, safer, more dependable and more sustainable energy system.

If we wanted to use nuclear plants to deliver the same power the solar panels delivered, the cost would be astronomical. Already, electricity from nuclear nuclear plants is some of the most expensive on the market, and that is with the plants predicted to operate more than 80% of the time and a payback period of 40-60 years. If we cut that operating time to 20% then the electricity would be upwards of $1/kwh. (average in US is $0.10/kwh and averge in Germany is $0.30/kwh.

We can and will replace the centralized thermal grids with distributed renewables; that is established by the limits of resources.