California Now Has More Than 150,000 Solar Roofs

[FBaggins]

7. Not exactly... but let's assume that to be the case.

We'll imagine that all of those technologies are in place... and have zero cost... and have zero loss from one cycle to the next... and no shortage of capacity. Then the proper comparison would be the total amount of electricity produced by each source over the course of a year. You don't care when or how reliably it's produced... just how much.

By that standard, the solar still isn't close to "equivalent". The coal plants run capacity factors in the 60-75% range (and could go higher)... while solar PV in California is in the 17-20% range. So those three average-sized coal plants produce somewhere between 3.5 and 5 times as much as the 1.56 GW of nameplate capacity in solar. In that imaginary world, the solar would still be easily worth building... because it would be much cheaper.

Taking it out of the range of the imagination... the ratio is much higher.