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NNadir

(36,747 posts)
3. As always there is the nearly illiterate use of units of peak power...
Tue Oct 14, 2025, 09:20 AM
Tuesday

...the Watt a unit of power as if it were a unit of energy The Joule is the unit of energy. The "home" is decidedly not a unit of energy.

Nevertheless journalists have abused the words for decades, with the result that the general public is confused about issues in energy, and in part this is the reason the planet is burning.

Solar facilities rarely achieve 30% of capacity utilization, even in deserts, so in terms of continuous average power, the proposed plant would have been equivalent to a roughly 2 GWe power plant, with the environmental and economic penalty of requiring a redundant reliable system.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, with two reactors produces 2 GWe of power, largely on a continuous uninterrupted basis on a 12 acre footprint. It does not require redundancy on a daily basis.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason does not make the right thing wrong.

Similarly doing the wrong thing for the right reason does not transmute wrong into right.

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