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ahz0001 t1_j7krxjb wrote

After this is added, how much will still be generated from coal and natural gas?

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matt7810 t1_j7l65p2 wrote

The US has about 1143GW of total generating capacity and about 4.12 trillion kWh of net generation per year. Each GW of solar energy capacity produces about 1.753×10^9 kWh of electricity per year based on an average capacity factor of 20%.

My personal guess is that coal production will continue to fall while natural gas generation will stay approximately the same because of the demand in 5, 15 minute markets but increasing prices leading to less new projects.

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somdude04 t1_j7lu09s wrote

So roughly 1.25% of annual generation will be this new large-scale solar.

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matt7810 t1_j7m36q1 wrote

Looks like that is approximately correct. Some of that production may be lost to plant activities (to line up with "net generation" definition), so this % may be a bit high, but it is in the ballpark.

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commonemitter t1_j7lvnfq wrote

Solar can never replace base load.

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RemoveInvasiveEucs t1_j7n4csk wrote

Not quite, battery storage is feasible and converts solar into a dispatchsble resource that is even better than baseload. You could run solar+batteries as baseload, but it's less desirable than fully dispatchsble.

And as the report says, there's 9.4GW of batteries to go with the 29GW of solar. As more solar is installed on the grid, the ratio of battery to storage will increase, to make sure that the energy is delivered at the right time. But we are in the early days of solar deployment, so not much storage is needed.

So there is a lot of reason for rejoicing at this news.

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