sendler2112 said:
"The Lakeview Generating Station supplied power to the province of Ontario from 1962 to 2005. It generated more than 215 billion kWh of electricity in its 43 years of operation."
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Keep in mind that they have demolished 4.000 MW of generating capacity. And in it's place now stands 44MW name plate capacity of solar. Which will actually have a capacity factor of 15% in it's snowy location. So will only average 6.6MW. 0.17% of it's former output. With many days near zero in the winter.
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This is where we are headed. Things will be much smaller and simpler once again in the future. Simplify now and beat the rush.
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"The Nanticoke Generating Station is a 44 MW solar power station which started operation in April 2019.[2] Previously from 1972 to 2013, it was the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. At full capacity, it could provide 3,964 MW of power into the southern Ontario power grid from its base in Nanticoke, Ontario, Canada,"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanticoke_Generating_Station
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Thanks for the link, yes this is quite a good example of "fossil fuel footprint/energy" vs "RE's Solar-Wind footprint/Energy" since they are building the solar panels right over the old coal-power station land.
Quote from the Wikipedia link "
Nameplate capacity 3964 MW (8 units) 1880 MW (4 units)"
You can see from this article here the picture of the completed solar farm half covered in snow matches perfectly with the cleared ground from googlemaps satellite view.
http://www.mining.com/former-coal-fired-power-plant-ontario-becomes-solar-facility/
The land-cleared area matches it in a kind of deformed irregular quadrilateral shape.
https://goo.gl/maps/eTVRFnR9eiWwW2W76
But the amazing thing is a 44MW solar farm in that location will have a similar solar capacity factor as what the UK/Northen Europe has which 10% of its claimed max power on average.
So that's really 4.4MW solar farm on average power output.
So if we take (4.4MW_average_power / 4000) = 0.0011 x 100 = 0.11% of the original plants output.
So this is a great "real-world data" example of what Solar can really do with a roughly same-sized footprint of land, that is Solar can provide 0.1% of the coals power station output on average. Nuclear is even better.
This is what's amazing about "theoretical" performance vs "real-world" performance.
While this data will not come to a surprise to any of us who have been on this thread for a long time now as we have gone over these real-world examples many times, we can do the general math in our heads without even thinking, it's still fun to do and it's a great example as its all in one spot.