So close - big save indeed.

It doesn't generate power by burning carbon and is a grid replacement for carbon sources. Grid cost rise sharply on 100% solar.

Taking china as an example they currently build solar, coal and nuclear. No country is building only solar/batteries.

Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.

Maybe there is a discussion to be had about WHY it needs to make economic sense? Power is a natural monopoly, maybe it doesn't need to be a part of the economy?

The correct unit is GW.

One upside -- is that SONGS being decommissioned gave the energy storage market the ability to level up in a big way back then. They filled part of the gap with some large MW procurements. Allowed BESS to be part of the collective energy solution. Nuclear + Solar + BESS + some small amounts of NG is a dream team.

The math in this comment is all over the place.

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).

Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW

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).

What does 2.2 MW/hour mean?

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%