memes

why I used the word "we",

Yes I understand what the word means. I used it as well. The point was the timing of your comment.

but I don't want to be accused of

You’re trying to make this problem about me again… I don’t think you’re actually trying.

any correction I'm making will seem like I'm assuming you don't understand basic concepts.

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.

A lower capacity factor doesn't necessarily indicate that an energy source is unreliable.

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, are indeed a measure of reliability. We have simply mostly been building wind and solar as we needed them and not building generators 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. 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 other 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):

• Reactor-grade uranium (3.5% U-235): 3,456,000 MJ/kg
• Sodium-ion battery: 0.27-0.72 MJ/kg

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:

already being used and doesn't need a decade of planning to get a single powerplant up and running.

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:

Have you thought about how you would provide power on those windless winter nights after an overcast day?

…we are kinda done here.