sorry, could you dumb this down a little? how does this affect the price/GW? (I'm not questioning it does, I'm saying I don't understand the rest of what you said)
I think the idea is that 10GW of solar only produces on average as much power as a 2.2GW "normal" power plant. So during the best parts of the day you're getting all 10GW. At night you're getting 0GW. On cloudy days you're getting less than 10GW. If you average it all out over a year you get about the same amount of total energy output from the 10GW solar plant as you would a 2.2GW traditional power plant.
So once you do that it goes from $1/watt to more like $4.50/watt. And it starts to look about the same as nuclear if in fact you can spend $5b and you get 1GW.
One nice thing about nuclear is that it's super steady 1GW 24/7 vs the solar needs to have battery storage too, and those batteries aren't free.
The Capacity Factor (essentially a plant's uptime) is important to consider, but isn't 100% for the other plant types either, though. Nuclear has 93% in the US, coal has 54%, and Solar PV 26%[0]. The 22% quoted by hokkos is probably specifically for PV plants in Australia.
msandford|5 years ago
So once you do that it goes from $1/watt to more like $4.50/watt. And it starts to look about the same as nuclear if in fact you can spend $5b and you get 1GW.
One nice thing about nuclear is that it's super steady 1GW 24/7 vs the solar needs to have battery storage too, and those batteries aren't free.
bobthepanda|5 years ago
Given that solar's cost trend has been going ever cheaper and nuclear's has done pretty much the opposite, solar will probably win out long term.
bildung|5 years ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
erentz|5 years ago
EdwardDiego|5 years ago
coverj|5 years ago