Hacker News Reader

I’m so tired explaining people what the capacity factor and baseload are and why wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants.

Germany has an installed solar capacity of 100 GW, 72 GW wind and some hydro and bio mass.

Yet there are 109 coal plants and 267 natural gas plants in Germany.

Comparing wind and solar with conventional power plants is completely pointless.

Unless you have a way of storing your power and replaying it when needed.

Like a lake that can maybe sustain 36GW of output for 10 hours.

I know it is a typo, but for other readers the figure in the article is 3.6 GW from 12 300 MW turbines, not 36 GW.

The best metric is CO2 reduction. Running fossil fuel plants for less time is a useful objective towards that.