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Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power

Such an incredibly misleading article.

1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.

Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.

PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.

Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.

At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.

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frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Five times more PVs at a 20% capacity factor means it evens out.

The vast majority of those PV installations were in the last 7 years or so. We also built more manufacturing capability during that time. Meaning PV installations are being rolled out on an exponential curve, not a linear one.

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- dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.
  
  It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.
  
  If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.
  
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  - frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    It’s exponential.
    
    livemint.com/…/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-po…
    
    To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
    
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    dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.
    
    Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years
    
    Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.
    
    The time between each doubling of output is increasing.
    
    It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.
    
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eleitl@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
My capacity factor is something like 11%. Need to recompute it, using latest data.

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