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I reckon solar is competitive in the day time without storage or peaker plants to support low generation time. I’d love to see the analysis of solar with the built in assumption of burdening the hourly cost with the infrastructure required to generate the required power at 10pm.

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The generation during the day will not be burdened by that infrastructure. The night time generation will simply be day time cost + infrastructure.

Theoretically, you can bet that your traditional power plant only runs at night. But now your capacity factor is less than half the available hours for the same capital investment and it looks even bleaker.

This is where I think it probably should be. Solar w/o another generation or storage source doesn't accurately represent the full picture of what is really required to support the a whole day of electricity. So the combined total cost is probably what should be shown to represent the costs of a full day cycle of solar, or a rainy day.

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