this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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I admit, I'm not innocent in that regard, that's why I used the word "we", but I don't want to be accused of mansplaining basic English to you as well, so I'll leave it at that. ;)
But I'm kinda hard pressed, to not sound like I'm trying to attack you personally, when you keep insisting how basic some of that stuff is. I don't know how I'm supposed to point out mistakes you're making in a way that doesn't feel like an attack under those circumstances. Really, any correction I'm making will seem like I'm assuming you don't understand basic concepts.
Nonetheless, I'm gonna keep doing that, because, frankly, I think you're making mistakes there. Your idea, that the analysis of the data is so basic, that pointing to the capacity factor proves your argument is one of them.
The capacity factor for nuclear power plants is so high, because they run almost all the time at or close to nameplate power. And yes, that means they have to be reliable to get to that number. But the inverse is not also true. A lower capacity factor doesn't necessarily indicate that an energy source is unreliable. It just says, that it's not running all the time at its specified peak power.
A brief (hypothetical) thought experiment: if you had an NPP that could easily and quickly adjust its power output and you used it at full power to get through those windless winter nights, but tuned it down during the day or shut it off completely on summer days, what would that mean for its average capacity factor?
Of course, it would decrease, because you wouldn't run it near peak output all the time anymore.
Does that mean it's suddenly an unreliable energy source? Of course not.
That's also what I meant by saying that you needed energy sources with a lower capacity factor to complement a solar/wind heavy system. I admit, that was horrible wording on my part, because it confused cause and effect.
What I meant is, it's not the low capacity factor that makes a generator suitable to fulfill that role, but any generator taking that role, is inevitably going to have a lower capacity factor, no matter how reliable.
If you look at the capacity factors for natural gas power plants using gas turbines, which you can find here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_a
You can see, that they are horribly low. That's not because they are super unreliable, but because they are rarely being used at their rated power. The best thing about gas turbines is that their power output can quickly be adjusted, and that's how they're being employed.
As to the capacity factor of solar/wind power plants: Of course, it's going to be lower. Naturally, they can't run at their peak power output all the time, but nobody expects them to do that anyway. A system could only be called unreliable, if it didn't deliever, what was expected of it. Just pointing to the capacity factor is simply not a good indicator of reliabilty, or rather unreliability, as should be clear by the examples given above.
And that's why I think that the diagram you provided, doesn't show, what you wanted it to show.
Yes I understand what the word means. I used it as well. The point was the timing of your comment.
You’re trying to make this problem about me again… I don’t think you’re actually trying.
Nope. If you just discuss things normally and don’t act like you’re talking to a five-year-old that has to be taught what table salt is we be just fine. Again, I’m not the problem here. Your pedantic way of discussing with someone is.
Of course you can turn many power plants down, it’s what we’ve been discussing. That being said, the capacity factor as they are used now, for solar and wind is indeed a measure of reliability. We have simply mostly been building wind and solar as we needed them and not building ones that were not needed anyway. Now as for the calculation for peak load plants, yes it leaves room for planned downtime. So in that sense it’s not a perfect measure of reliability. But the point is that for solar and wind, it basically is, which is the way I used it. So if you want we can also talk about other measures like effective load carrying capacity, but the reliability numbers won’t really change. Capacity factors are simple, not perfect, but that’s not really an issue in this discussion.
So I understand your point about gas turbines, but we are trying to get rid of those, so they’re kind of pointless to mention. But it does help my point a bit: NPP’s can also work in load follow mode as they already are doing in France. Sodium batteries haven’t been proven to be reliable through the decades or in all sorts of conditions because we have had so little of them to be able to do anything more than speculate. So unless you have some other kind of new green, reliable power plant that you can build quickly and easily switch on and off that you want to tell the world about, this is kinda it.
Reliability aside, there is also energy density. Comparing uranium to your example of sodium-ion batteries (which, incidentally we don’t have any production capacity for on any scale that isn’t a drop in a very salty ocean and have very little to do with table salt):
Please correct my calculations if I made a mistake, but to get the same energy that only 1 kilogram of reactor-grade uranium provides, you would need sodium ion batteries with a total weight of 4.8 - 12.8 million kilograms. Even at millions of kilograms they don’t provide any power themselves, so you need even more solar cells to charge them. About 3-3.5 million for one NPP. Of course these calculations are rough and don’t take rechargeability into account (but I also didn’t factor in other things that make batteries even worse), but you get the idea.
So your:
Is simply wishful thinking, like I said.
And even then… the batteries will have run out on those quiet winter nights after an overcast day.
So unless you stop beating around the bush about the question I’m asking for the fourth time now:
…we are kinda done here.