RE: Wind power now exceeds nuclear

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Wind power now exceeds nuclear

in climate •  8 years ago 

No, that's not quite right. Wind has a CF of 0.3 and nuclear has a CF of 0.75, so they would have to install 2.5x the capacity to match the power production. But wind capacity is about a third of the cost of nuclear capacity, so they technologies are neck and neck economically. The biggest differentiators are intermittency of wind and nuclear waste.

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Intermittency means you need another equivalent total capacity
Which means you lose all captal and fuel lowering once you take the complete system to provide X Mw to the grid.

No, it doesn't mean that. All generating sources are intermittent, and the grid has always been designed to deal with that. Equipment needs to be maintained or breaks down unexpectedly, so you always need surplus generation capacity available to avoid outage. That doesn't mean that all electricity generators are worthless.

No, you are completely misrepresenting the availability of the power source.
If gas plants had to shut down for half of every day, or for days at a time randomly, no one would build them. And no one would claim their capacity was wonderful if they hit full capacity only rarely, and averaged about 30% when they ran at all.