Amid the transition to an electrified transportation sector, efforts to decarbonize the U.S. power grid are evident in the planned additions and retirements of utility-scale electricity generating capacity.
Demanding people talk about average power when they’re talking about capacity is idiotic.
If you have a 1GW load to run for two hours at midnight on a winter day 1GWac solar array is useless. So is a 200MW fossil fuel plant which generates the same average power over the year. If you need to run 1GW of AC during the hottest hours of the year, the solar array is pretty good, but the 200MW thermal plant is still useless.
A 200MW OCGT peaker that runs for 2 hours in california during summer is fully replaced by a 200MW 2 hour hattery array because it will never be short of energy to charge.
The industry standard measure is watts.
Pretending a gas peaker is the same as a coal plant whilst pearl clutching that capacity is being discussed is disingenuous nonsense.
Sure…but don’t use capacity to compare directly with amount generated. Mixing units like that in a comparison tends to result in nonsense answers.
Capacity measures capacity.
Demanding people talk about average power when they’re talking about capacity is idiotic.
If you have a 1GW load to run for two hours at midnight on a winter day 1GWac solar array is useless. So is a 200MW fossil fuel plant which generates the same average power over the year. If you need to run 1GW of AC during the hottest hours of the year, the solar array is pretty good, but the 200MW thermal plant is still useless.
A 200MW OCGT peaker that runs for 2 hours in california during summer is fully replaced by a 200MW 2 hour hattery array because it will never be short of energy to charge.
The industry standard measure is watts.
Pretending a gas peaker is the same as a coal plant whilst pearl clutching that capacity is being discussed is disingenuous nonsense.