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Because you're lying about the -50C. Looking at weather records in Edmonton (one of the coldest major cities in Canada) back to the 1800's, there hasn't been a single recorded day where the temperature reached -50C. Link: https://www.currentresults.com...

The way to deliver solar power when and where you need it is the real problem, but at 50% nuclear they may actually have a better solution than many other countries.
Btw. Mainland France has between 1500 and 2800 hours of sun per year (4 to 8 per day). So 3 to 5 hours is a conservative estimate based on insolation.
https://www.currentresults.com...
Efficiency of the panels will drop by rougly 1% per year over 20 years.
https://www.engineering.com/De...
For windmills the issues are similar, but they may actually help a little (more wind on cloudy days).

Pittsburgh is a great place unless you want to see the horizon. With all those rolling hills the most you can really see in any direction is about a 1/2 mile. After growing up in a place where I could see the horizon I actually felt a bit claustrophobic in Pittsburgh.

And it ranks just behind Seattle for cloudy days, so don;t plan on seeing much in the way of sunlight.

https://www.currentresults.com...

At the opposite end of the spectrum I loved living and working in Salt Lake City for the vistas and the sunshine (other things not so much)

...use one's eyes to know that climate change is real. When I was a kid, in the 80's, I normally had my coat, and gloves out by this time in November. Shoot we had at least 1 to 3 inches of snowfall by this time in November. Don't believe me then look here: https://www.currentresults.com... Then fast forward to 2016: there is no snow in sight, and it is 72 degrees currently in Overland Park, KS where I am. Don't tell me climate change doesn't exist. If you don't believe your senses then look at the great barrier reef that is slowly dying due to the water being too warm http://news.nationalgeographic... Climate change is real, but IMO there is nothing that we can do about it now. Humanity hasn't invested enough time in developing clean energy, clean transportation, etc. to turn things around. A few people like Elon Musk are trying, but the price point for Teslas are still beyond most peoples reach. Very few people that are in that price point are also Earth conscious / green.

Average high temp for a Tucson summer is 99 degrees, so no, 114 is not a cold day. In fact, there's only 7 days on record where it's ever reached that high.

As an Alaskan, I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. How do you like the idea of fresh snowfall in May?

Interest on the loans to build the factory runs 24/7 365 and depending on the location. Let's take Fort Myers FL. A location known for sunny days. Average sunny days a year including partly sunny days is only 259. That would mean that on average you would be down 27% of the time.
http://www.currentresults.com/...
BTW I picked the best city in Florida.
At the extreme end you have Yuma AZ, with 313 days a year. That gives you 14% downtime which is still 2 orders of magnitude greater than your 10ths of a percent. So even at Yuma you are talking about a downtime of around 75% vs 24/7/365 You could of course use mandatory downtime maintenance but you are also assuming a zero startup time and shutdown time which I do not think is accurate. Then throw in the higher cost of solar vs natural gas and nuclear.

"It's not outside of the realm of possibility that we will find much cheaper ways to store electricity overnight for a couple of days with decent round trip efficiency either. "

No it is not but it is unlikely. People have been working on this problem for many decades so a huge breakthrough is not very likely.

Molten Salt reactors and Thorium breeder reactors have been build and work. A molten salt thorium breeder reactor is just combining two technologies that have already been tested.
 

This snow clearing suggestion probably works, except for heavy snowfalls. Upstate New York, e.g., or the Chugach. I'm from Valdez and the concept is hilarious. Plus heating up snow is an energy-intensive operation, and any time you've had snow it must necessarily have been overcast, and in Alaska that means that you're probably dealing with less than six hours of daylight. I'd say the method of clearing the panels with the best ROI would be to say, "Fuck it" and drink until springtime, but that's how I approach most issues with winter in that State. It's a very popular strategy as I'm sure you've noticed.

You are one of the few mentioning rainwater collection. Well done. Average rainfall is California is around 10 inches per year. Google says California has 163,696 square miles of area. 1 furlong per fortnight = 0.000166309524 m/s. Carry the naught. [This is to appease Europeans, and hillbillies, alike] 3,800,000,000,000 cubic feet of water fall on California each year. 7.5 US gallons per cubic foot. 28 trillion gallons in total. Total water usage, average to a per capita is around 2,000 gallons per person. California population is around 37M. 28 T / (37M * 2K) = 425. One year's California rainfall could service the entire state's water needs for 425 years. Recovering one-quarter of one percent of the rain that falls on the state each year would provide enough water for everyone for the entire year.

Your statistics are based on normal weather patterns. California's weather has been anything but normal for the last six or seven years. NO rain has been falling. NONE. The reservior is entirely dry. Just sand. Therefore your hypothesis is entirely useless.

You are one of the few mentioning rainwater collection. Well done.

Average rainfall is California is around 10 inches per year. Google says California has 163,696 square miles of area.

1 furlong per fortnight = 0.000166309524 m/s. Carry the naught. [This is to appease Europeans, and hillbillies, alike]

3,800,000,000,000 cubic feet of water fall on California each year. 7.5 US gallons per cubic foot. 28 trillion gallons in total.

Total water usage, average to a per capita is around 2,000 gallons per person.

California population is around 37M.

28 T / (37M * 2K) = 425.

One year's California rainfall could service the entire state's water needs for 425 years.
Recovering one-quarter of one percent of the rain that falls on the state each year would provide enough water for everyone for the entire year.

If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer).

Point of order, the annual average humidity is lower in Dallas than it is in LA.

If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer).

Point of order, the annual average humidity is lower in Dallas than it is in LA.

Where do you got those imaginary numbers from?
Average number of sun hours per year per federal state in Germany 2013: http://de.statista.com/statist...
Who would build a solar plant if the average hours per day is only 2.5h? For how insane and insane rich to you hold Germany? Freiburg e.g. has 1740 sun hours per year, roughly 4.75 per day ... but averages like this are pretty meaningless. If you plan a plant it makes more sense to look at the monthly distribution and consider costs/profits over the course of typical days.
Especially regarding wind, the average helps you nothing to plan the plant.
Capacity Factors are meaningless numbers as well, they only help you to judge ROI (very unprecisely). CFs are basically an invention of anti renewable advocates, however I'm shocked that even General Electric puts CF into the specs of their wind turbines (and wrongly even, I wonder if that is done by the marketing devision alone). CFs are irrelevant because as a grid operator you want to know how much concrete power a plant will produce the next hour, the next four hours and the next 24 hours: the concrete power, not a fancy number. So every plant has depending on location and orientation a specific load curve. With that load curve and the weather forecast, and the metering over the last 24hours the plant operator determines the concrete power production as explained above. There is no CF involved in such a calculation.

Here, the sunniest places of the world. Your 'fantasy numbers' are nearly off by 100% :) http://www.currentresults.com/...

AC's formulae are correct, but his numeric values suck. Solar cell wattage output starts declining after a few years, and German cities only receive approx much less than the 3,000 sun-hours/year his calculations assume. 1650 sun-hours is a much more accurate estimate.

That number is pretty much useless as PV cells don't need direct, unclouded sunlight to work. So when considering the time available for production of solar energy, it is probably safe to assume 365 days with daylight at daytime and average them as always cloudy.

200 W * 10 hours a day = 2 kWh per day. In a year, it'll produce perhaps 600 kWh (assuming 300 days of sun). Most panels are guaranteed for 20 years, so that's roughly 12000 kWh over the lifetime of the panel. 12000 kWh > 4000 kWh, no?

AC's formulae are correct, but his numeric values suck. Solar cell wattage output starts declining after a few years, and German cities only receive approx much less than the 3,000 sun-hours/year his calculations assume. 1650 sun-hours is a much more accurate estimate.

That immediately drops the theoretical max output way down to 6,600 kWh.

If PV efficiency drops from 100% when installed to 80% in 20 years, then for easy of calculations let's call it 90% efficiency. That drops the cell's total output to 5,940 kWh.

More than needed to manufacture, but is it enough to be economical?

Did we watch the same video?

She specifically claims that Germany "gets more sun than us" then goes on and seemingly clarifies a bit, that "us" means east coast.

So let's stick with that for a moment. Let's pick New York state, because in all likelihood that's where the studio is, and compare climate to Germany.

It's a bit tricker than I'd like, because New York is listed in days and %sunshine, and Germany is listed in hours, but in the state overview for the US, Syracuse is listed at 2,120 hours.

So, Syracuse has the third lowest number of sunshine days, and the lowest percentage of sunshine of the listed cities in New York, but it still has 14% more sunshine hours than Zugspitze, which is the one with the highest number of sunshine hours in Germany.

Remind me again, how she's right about Germany being sunnier?

And let's not forget that one of the northernmost towns in New York is Champlain, located at 44;57N, whereas one of the southernmost towns in Germany is Oberstdorf, located at 47;25N. Or for the layman amongst us, Oberstdorf is located 274 km further North than Champlain.

This will obviously have an impact on the amount of energy you can extract from the sun, and wouldn't you know it - that's exactly what the lovely chart from the NREL shows as well.

But maybe I misunderstood her completely. Maybe she was referring to some other east cost - the east cost of Alaska doesn't exactly seem to be a sunshine state.

As someone else said earlier, for an expert she certainly seems ignorant. I'm not whoring myself out as an expert on the subject, and I could tear her argument to shreds with less than five minutes of fact checking. The only thing she seems to be an expert on, is telling the hosts what they want to hear.

Whether or not you like the idea of subsidising solar energy, I'd think you'd like to have the facts straight. Facts aren't political, unless you believe that reality has a liberal bias.

This is the problem in general. Not that it's on Fox News Channel, but that the hosts aren't interested in presenting the truth, but simply what supports their (or their employer's) views. This happens all the time, but we pick on Fox News a lot more, because they are so horribly bad at lying.

Did we watch the same video?

She specifically claims that Germany "gets more sun than us" then goes on and seemingly clarifies a bit, that "us" means east coast.

So let's stick with that for a moment. Let's pick New York state, because in all likelihood that's where the studio is, and compare climate to Germany.

It's a bit tricker than I'd like, because New York is listed in days and %sunshine, and Germany is listed in hours, but in the state overview for the US, Syracuse is listed at 2,120 hours.

So, Syracuse has the third lowest number of sunshine days, and the lowest percentage of sunshine of the listed cities in New York, but it still has 14% more sunshine hours than Zugspitze, which is the one with the highest number of sunshine hours in Germany.

Remind me again, how she's right about Germany being sunnier?

And let's not forget that one of the northernmost towns in New York is Champlain, located at 44;57N, whereas one of the southernmost towns in Germany is Oberstdorf, located at 47;25N. Or for the layman amongst us, Oberstdorf is located 274 km further North than Champlain.

This will obviously have an impact on the amount of energy you can extract from the sun, and wouldn't you know it - that's exactly what the lovely chart from the NREL shows as well.

But maybe I misunderstood her completely. Maybe she was referring to some other east cost - the east cost of Alaska doesn't exactly seem to be a sunshine state.

As someone else said earlier, for an expert she certainly seems ignorant. I'm not whoring myself out as an expert on the subject, and I could tear her argument to shreds with less than five minutes of fact checking. The only thing she seems to be an expert on, is telling the hosts what they want to hear.

Whether or not you like the idea of subsidising solar energy, I'd think you'd like to have the facts straight. Facts aren't political, unless you believe that reality has a liberal bias.

This is the problem in general. Not that it's on Fox News Channel, but that the hosts aren't interested in presenting the truth, but simply what supports their (or their employer's) views. This happens all the time, but we pick on Fox News a lot more, because they are so horribly bad at lying.

Did we watch the same video?

She specifically claims that Germany "gets more sun than us" then goes on and seemingly clarifies a bit, that "us" means east coast.

So let's stick with that for a moment. Let's pick New York state, because in all likelihood that's where the studio is, and compare climate to Germany.

It's a bit tricker than I'd like, because New York is listed in days and %sunshine, and Germany is listed in hours, but in the state overview for the US, Syracuse is listed at 2,120 hours.

So, Syracuse has the third lowest number of sunshine days, and the lowest percentage of sunshine of the listed cities in New York, but it still has 14% more sunshine hours than Zugspitze, which is the one with the highest number of sunshine hours in Germany.

Remind me again, how she's right about Germany being sunnier?

And let's not forget that one of the northernmost towns in New York is Champlain, located at 44;57N, whereas one of the southernmost towns in Germany is Oberstdorf, located at 47;25N. Or for the layman amongst us, Oberstdorf is located 274 km further North than Champlain.

This will obviously have an impact on the amount of energy you can extract from the sun, and wouldn't you know it - that's exactly what the lovely chart from the NREL shows as well.

But maybe I misunderstood her completely. Maybe she was referring to some other east cost - the east cost of Alaska doesn't exactly seem to be a sunshine state.

As someone else said earlier, for an expert she certainly seems ignorant. I'm not whoring myself out as an expert on the subject, and I could tear her argument to shreds with less than five minutes of fact checking. The only thing she seems to be an expert on, is telling the hosts what they want to hear.

Whether or not you like the idea of subsidising solar energy, I'd think you'd like to have the facts straight. Facts aren't political, unless you believe that reality has a liberal bias.

This is the problem in general. Not that it's on Fox News Channel, but that the hosts aren't interested in presenting the truth, but simply what supports their (or their employer's) views. This happens all the time, but we pick on Fox News a lot more, because they are so horribly bad at lying.

Just FYI, according to StatsCan (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/kits-trousses/cyb-adc1999/ecozone/edu04_0092f-eng.htm) lists the largest 1-day snowfall in Canada at 118.1 cm at Lakelse Lake, B.C., on January 17, 1974. Other sources (e.g., http://www.currentresults.com/Weather-Extremes/Canada/snowiest.php) list Tahtsa Lake, BC, receiving 145 cm of snow on February 11, 1999. Both are far below your 8m statement... Now snow drifts, especially against a building, will get much higher...

Kenya should probably go solar since it scales better at the small end, requires less transmission infrastructure. It is interesting that it doesn't seem to have much more sunlight than many American cities, at least according to casual web search:

      http://www.climatetemp.info/kenya/

      http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-sunshine-by-city.php

It's not just a choice based on how it's manufactured... I'd dare to argue that we don't have as much area to grow sugar cane as brazil. It's a tropical plant. It needs somewhere north of 125cm/year of rainfall to grow, high humidity and lots of sun. Unfortunately most of our agriculture land does not support those conditions. Brazil is MADE for cane. Where we grow stuff, it's made for corn, and maybe switchgrass? Compare Iowa/nebraska, indiana, illinois, where corn is grown, to Louisiana, Florida and Hawaii, where we can grow cane. Add to that, hawaii is tiny, florida and Louisiana have a lot of unaccessable swamp, and that florida land prices are at a premium.

http://www.tangail.110mb.com/sugar.php production amounts
http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/USLA0231 - AVG rainfall/temp of US States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Brazil
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Iowa/average-annual-temperatures.php - Iowa average Temp - high 50s, low 60s
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Louisiana/average-annual-temperatures.php - Louisiana avg temp high 80s

It's not just a choice based on how it's manufactured... I'd dare to argue that we don't have as much area to grow sugar cane as brazil. It's a tropical plant. It needs somewhere north of 125cm/year of rainfall to grow, high humidity and lots of sun. Unfortunately most of our agriculture land does not support those conditions. Brazil is MADE for cane. Where we grow stuff, it's made for corn, and maybe switchgrass? Compare Iowa/nebraska, indiana, illinois, where corn is grown, to Louisiana, Florida and Hawaii, where we can grow cane. Add to that, hawaii is tiny, florida and Louisiana have a lot of unaccessable swamp, and that florida land prices are at a premium.

http://www.tangail.110mb.com/sugar.php production amounts
http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/USLA0231 - AVG rainfall/temp of US States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Brazil
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Iowa/average-annual-temperatures.php - Iowa average Temp - high 50s, low 60s
http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Louisiana/average-annual-temperatures.php - Louisiana avg temp high 80s