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1) None of these are grid scale. 2) All of them are heavily subsidized.

The closest I see in that list is Mount Signal 3, which comes in at about 1/3 the capacity of a typical grid-scale generating station (1/6 if you account for the fact that it's producing zero power half the time, on average). It also chews up nearly 2,000 acres of land.




Hillston is 120 megawatts. Sun Streams 2 is 200 megawatts. Mount Signal 3 is 328 megawatts. The coal fired generating plants that retired in the US in the past decade were often smaller than that.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7290

The table above shows that the coal generators that retired between 2009 and 2011 had an average size of 59 megawatts (MW). By contrast, the average size of a coal-fired plant planned for retirement between 2012 and 2015 is 154 MW, more than twice the average size of the units retired during the 2009-2011 period.

In 2022, coal fired generators had a capacity factor of ~48% in the United States:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Photovoltaic solar farms attained ~25% capacity factor in 2022:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

As a rough guide you can estimate that an American solar farm will generate about as much electricity annually as an American coal plant with half the nameplate capacity. Mount Signal 3 would roughly match a 164 megawatt coal fired generator for annual generation.


We were comparing nuclear and solar, not coal and solar.

164 megawatts (328 / 2, to account for the fact that solar plants are offline a minimum of half the time) is not anywhere in the same league as nuclear power plant, which are typically in the 2-3 gigawatt range, with modern large-scale plants producing 6-8 gigawatts.

The Mount Signal 3 plant also used up 2,000 acres (800 hectares of Imperial Valley farm land.




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