A kWh is a kWh. A kWh of either solar or nuke means a kWh of coal or gas was not burnt. Seems like apples to apples to me.
They appear to accept this as inevitable and are also really angry about it despite it being the greatest economic, technical and political miracle of our age.
Even though their beloved French nuclear grid never got this far, they have convinced themselves that only nuclear can deliver those last 20%.
The whole viewpoint is bizarre and makes no internal logical sense and seem mostly based on hating admitting you were wrong about something.
A kWh isn’t a kWh if one contributes to grid stability and the other relies on it.
Solar is now displacing more kWh of fossil emissions per year than nukes, despite whatever complaints you may have.
Every kWh hour of solar entering the grid is a kWh of fossil generation that is no longer produced. Batteries just move existing power around. This is not very complicated, I’m not sure why the semantic crusade?
The article is about recorded actual supply contributions over a year, actual kWh, regardless of instantaneous capacity at various times.
Every kWh of produced and accepted(not curtailed) solar power is directly responsible for reducing our emissions
Power is instantaneous. A solar panel doesn't get the same credit for generating electricity when there's already a surplus as it does when that electricity is needed. I don't just mean credit in principle, I mean literal credit. In a functioning market, the marginal value of surplus electricity tends sharply towards zero, potentially becoming negative. Solar generators have almost no marginal cost of production, so there's little reason to expect producers to withhold generation simply because the market price is approaching zero.
Batteries don't just "move existing power around". They can absorb worthless renewable generation that would otherwise have been curtailed, then supply it when the grid would otherwise fall back to coal or gas.
It should also be noted that the remaining solar production doesn't exclusively represent the curtailment of emissions-producing generation. It can also represent the curtailment of other zero emissions sources like wind. Probably not to a significant degree, but I'm sure it's not zero.
A kWh is a kWh in terms of energy. It isn't necessarily a kWh of equivalent economic value, emissions reduction or contribution to grid reliability.
A produced accepted kWh is absolutely equivalent in terms of emissions reduction. It is one to one, over an annual timeframe. One renewable kWh in, one fossil out. This is a record of power actually supplied, not instantaneous capacity or whatever. KW is instantaneous, provided kWh is historical.
I think you’re just making different points about economic value or grid reliability. You’re probably right about those things! You are concerned about the grid integration and reliability of solar, which is fair. And those issues may impact the ability of solar to get higher grid kWh contributions than today.
but these points don’t take away from the facts in the article - that solar produced and this displaced more emissions than nuclear in the last year.