alt Hacker Newsdiablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual
the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.
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Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.
> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.
Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.
The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).
Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.
But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.
So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).
Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW
Diablo Canyon can output 2.2 GW, if you assume 50% (1.1 GW) for the sustained output, I come up with 9636 GWh per year, or ~19,200 GWh per year if it was able to run at 100%
The math in this comment is all over the place.