I found a story about a new nuke plant in Georgia [1] which they seem like they are regretting building.
It's a $25 billion project which is several years late now. [2]
They are building two new generators which should each produce 1,215 MW of power. So that's ~$10 million per MW. Solar by comparison is about $1 million per MW, although a 1,215 MW solar installation would cover about 10 sq km.
I have to assume that solar, without any waste to process or high security requirements or chance of a meltdown, also has lower operating costs.
You also have to factor in the capacity factor. Sun isn't shining steadily all the time. You have night-time, notably, but also clouds and fog and smog. Capacity factor is very much location dependant, but all the places with good capacity factors are where people don't want to live either.
It can be as low as 12% [0], so divide your $/MW by the capacity factor to ascertain the true cost: something like $8 million/MW for solar in Swabia.
Thank you for that. I didn’t realize that was a fake headline grabbing number. It makes no sense to me that the headline numbers are not actual 24/7/365 average generating capacity and rather peak capacity, since it can be calculating quite accurately in the long run.
The numbers make a lot more sense with that. As I was typing it it didn’t seem right.
