this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Am I reading this right?
This source says we generate 4 trillion kilowatt hours annually, which is 40 million gigawatt hours.
The link in the post says we’re adding 48 gigawatts of renewables (56*86%) this year and taking away 14.5 gigawatts of fossil fuels.
That… seems like not enough
You're comparing GW (nameplate capacity, how much it can generate at a given instant) with GWH (amount generated over the course of a year) which makes things look a lot worse than it is.
It's stlll not enough; I'm expecting the rate of decarbonization to pick up as the factories to support it are finished
the amount generated is more relevant. stating capacity is misleading: ofc higher amount generated implies higher capacity.
1gw solar power plant will produce (random numbers) 4gwh in 4 hours per day ( in summer it produces 10gwh in 10 hours per summer day, and 2gwh in 2 hours per winter day, 4 kinda annual average, again, random.. ) so in a year, it produces 4*365= 1460gwh, when 100% uptime, less if there is downtime. fossil for exemple: 1gw fossil plant produces 24gwh per day, thats 8760gwh per year but with 100% year long uptime: 20% downtime->7008gwh only, so on and so forth..stating capacity is misleading, show us productions graphs that could help judge how much generated in said area per year.
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.