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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

350MV is the nameplate capacity. To get the actual generated power, you must, tragically, multiply by the capacity factor.

What's the capacity factor for Cleve Hill? We don't have to guess, it's in this document:

https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/wp-conten...

It's 10.8%.

This is a 35MW plant. Oh, but it has batteries I hear you saying!

Doesn't matter. It will generate 35MW-years per year. Batteries, at best, mean wasting less of it.

Meanwhile, a 350MW nuclear plant has a capacity factor of 90%, most of the loss being conversion to AC, with a bit of downtime.

So that would deliver 315MW-years of energy, per year.

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The topic is this: You are aware that not every place in the world has the weather found in California, yes?

Nothing you mentioned supports the false claim that you need sunny weather for solar to be a viable source of energy.

Not to mention that several sources say it will generate 350 MW of power. And that it will power about 100,000 homes. I'm pretty sure that's not happening with a 35MW plant.

You're repeating something which I just debunked with a canonical source.

That doesn't speak well of either your perspicacity nor judgement. Good luck.

I read the source and you are wrong. Here is the official website and I quote:

"This is a project that will generate up to 350MW of clean renewable electricity to power over 91,000 homes"

https://www.clevehillsolar.com/

Which is misleading..

It isn't misleading.

It is to me. "Up to“ is weasel language. It might support 100k homes for a few moments on an ideal day

Or according to the math in another comment, over 350k homes on long sunny summer days. Is it weasel language that the new nuclear towers in question here didn't include the 1 in ~200,000 documented chance of disaster due to earthquake in their press releases, their capacity estimates, and the price?

Is it weasel language that the press releases don't include the fact that Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy over the Vogtle nuclear build in discussion? I don't see the fact that the U.S. government has given $8.3 billion of loan guarantees to help finance construction of the Vogtle reactors included in press releases either.

Considering this solar installation is a for-profit venture in cloudy UK and will reduce carbon output without subsidies, I'm calling it a win whether it powers 1000 houses or 350,000.

You skipped the critical "up to" part when re-quoting this in your previous message. The capacity factor is what determines how close the average is to that theoretical maximum. With 10.8%, the answer is "not close at all".

So far zero people have given a source showing that the claim of powering 91,000 homes is an outrageous lie. Zero sources is "not close at all" to showing that the actual output is going to be so wildly different from what every source says will be the actual, not theoretical, output.

350MW / 91000 homes = 3.8kW / home (24/7), which seems very very high.

Again, the claim on the website is "has the potential to power over 91,000 homes". "up to", "has the potential", etc. But let's do some quick back of the envelope maths.

91,000 homes would be about 91,000 * 3,000 kWh / year = 273 TWh / year. You need an average of 31 MW over a year to produce this, which roughly tracks 350 MW with ~10% capacity factor. So over a year this seems to be correct.

On a day to day basis however the project only includes 700 MWh of storage. That's about 24h of the electricity consumption of 91,000 homes. A single cloudy winter day and those batteries are empty. So if you look at shorter time periods than a full year there's a huge variation in how many households can actually be reliably powered by such an installation. It's likely somewhere between 1,000 (several days of cloudy winter) and 350,000 homes (sunny summer).

Thanks - that's the best explanation I've seen so far.

> It's likely somewhere between 1,000 (several days of cloudy winter)

How do you figure? Solar technology is moving so rapidly you can't even look at the efficiency of the panels from a few years ago to do the math. Is the 1,000 number a guess or did you do the math for the 900,000 some panels they will have at that site?

Don’t forget https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ;)

Your original comment was wildly correct. I do admire your effort to correct an Internet.

I do wonder why so many people seem to be so tragically misinformed about the topic of power generation. It is a complicated subject, but the information is available, and yet simple facts seem to be so wilfully ignored. Where is the canonical resource for well written truthful FAQs about power generation?

Things are moving very quickly in PV. Something that was true in 2019 may no longer be true.

This year, for instance, the majority of Chinese manufacturing capacity, the largest manufacturers (and possibly the majority of panels manufactured, although data are sparse) have moved from p-PERC to TOPCon, precisely because of the latter's better low-light performance (and lesser reasons). p-PERC dominated from about 2015 to 2021 (after polycrys, a-Si, CdTe thin-film and CI(G)S lost the growth race). Some manufacturers are moving to heterojunction instead. HJT also does better than p-PERC. So we are moving on from p-PERC apparently.

Also this year, a large minority, or the majority (again public data are rare) of panels are bifacial, in order to capture light reflected off the ground (snow, in particular) to improve winter performance and low sun angle performance/capacity factor.

Clouds and winter are not PV killers.

> Things are moving very quickly in PV.

Hope is not a plan.

As Germany is going to find out this winter.

It's not hope. Things have moved quickly. This discussion started with the false claim that solar needs sunny California type weather. Which was true in recent history. Now it does not need California type weather. Cleve Hill solar park will run as a for-profit commercial enterprise, without government subsidies. In cloudy UK. UK being located at the northern part of the planet.

> As Germany is going to find out this winter.

Germany's problems have more to do with the non-viability of relying on Russian gas than on anything else. You can predict things like the Ukraine war as well as you can predict an earthquake at Fukushima. Or as well as you can predict Westinghouse Electric declaring bankruptcy over the Vogtle nuclear plant in discussion. Not a great look for nuclear when the government needs to step in and guarantee loans.

> This discussion started with the false claim that solar needs sunny California type weather.

There was no such claim.

Again, I think we're done here.

> There was no such claim.

Anyone can read to the top of thread and see that you are wrong about what started the discussion.

> Again, I think we are done here.

Are you an airplane? You don't need to keep announcing your delayed departure. You can just really leave.

How does nuclear help Germany this winter? Bear in mind Russia makes about half the world's nuclear fuel and has been sanctioned, and Germany's plants need refueling.

Things are stalled in nuclear. Hope is, indeed, not a plan.

A plan is a plan, and PV has one. Wind has another.

Straightforward engineering optimisations, hundreds of them, all adding up, with few political considerations. (I won't say no political considerations, because there are always people who will cut off their nose to spite their face.)

Nuclear has hope and promises.

> How does nuclear help Germany this winter?

Well, it doesn't, because they've shut all their nuclear plants down.

That's rather the point, yo.

So you need years and years to build nuclear don't you? Sounds like hopium to rely on an unpopular source of energy that has decades long contruction times. And the builder has to declare bankruptcy. Wind and solar are far faster and less risky financially to build. Yo.

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