Comparing the Desert Sun Solar Facility with Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant: Energy, Cost, and Land Area.
The data for this post can be found, as provided by the California Energy Commission, here: QFER Power Plant Annual Generation, by clicking on Visit Tableau for the full page layout of dashboard, and finally clicking on the "Download Data" button to download either a *.CSV file or *XLS file to get the output of every power plant in California.
The output of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is not listed using the term "nuclear," but simply as "Diablo Canyon,"
One can then do simple calculations.
Using the "Capacity" Column on can calculate the theoretical energy that a plant operating 100% of time for a year, and using the data for actual output, in derived units of energy, GWh (power times time) to determine the capacity utilization of the plants
The Data for the size (land area) and cost of the Desert Sun Solar Facility is taken from the Wikipedia page without using the references therein, with the exception of references 10 and 11 referring to environmental groups that, in contrast to may other self declared environmental groups which in my opinion are anything but environmentalists, I actually consider seriously concerned with the preservation of wilderness. The cost of the Desert Solar plant is assumed to be equal to the Federal Land Guarantees reported required to build it for its owners, 1.46 Billion USD.
The data for the energy output is not taken from the Wikipedia page, but from the *.xls file which gives data for each plant from 2001 through 2023.
The Desert Sun Solar Plant became operational in 2013, but apparently was not completed that year, but was fully complete by 2014. Formal commissioning took place in 2015, but the plant was apparently fully operational in 2014. Thus data selected for both the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant and the two Desert Sun Solar Plants, one of which has a rated peak capacity of 250 MW, and the other a rated peak capacity of 300 MW, is included, only from 2014 to 2023.
2014 is an interesting year in the history of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere, by the way. It was the first year in which the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide, as measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory exceeded 400 ppm, which it did in the week beginning March 16, 2014. No one alive today will ever see a reading at the observatory (or another observatory on the planet since NOAA may be shut by the national ignoramuses coming to put the United States into a dictatorship of ignorance and hatred of science) lower than 400 ppm. The last time such a reading was observed was in the week beginning November 1, 2015, when the reading was 399.06 ppm.
The readings there as of this morning:
Week beginning on December 08, 2024: 425.67 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 421.93 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 398.87 ppm
Last updated: December 15, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
It looks like the "renewable energy will save us" scam put forth by antinukes (who do not now, and never have, had much of a problem with fossil fuels) didn't work out all that well.
OK, let's get to the comparative numbers. For this purpose, I have downloaded the Excel file from the link above, translated the derived unit of energy, GWh, which is not SI unit into the SI unit, the Joule, and arranged the columns for presentation for the purposes here. One is free to check my work in doing so, since the data tables are available to anyone who gives a shit about data as opposed to soothsaying about some far off Godotian so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come.
Performance of Desert Sun Solar 2014-2023:
Performance of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant:
As a comment, as someone familiar with the performance of nuclear power plants, this performance is somewhat disappointing, although it is obviously far more reliable than the Desert Sun Solar plant, at least if one can compare numbers, something that often seems out of reach for many antinukes around here. Many nuclear plants around the world, and in the United States, have far higher capacity utilizations, typically at, near, or sometimes exceeding 100% capacity utilization.
Now the "money shot" comparing the land requirements, energy production and costs of the solar facility with the last and sole nuclear plant in California:
I can't speak for anyone else's self declared "environmentalism" but my own is consistent with that of the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, which called for the minimization of the destruction of wilderness for commercial purposes. The Sierra Club, which, in my opinion, has morphed into a society of bourgeois airheads who never saw a wilderness they didn't want to morph into an industrial park for so called "renewable energy," was founded in a failed effort to preserve the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park, which is now a reservoir with a hydroelectric plant.
Note that the costs associated with the Desert Sun Solar facility, which I regard as an obscenity near the border of a precious national preserve, the Joshua Tree National Park, do not include the costs of the power lines, nor most importantly, does it include the unacceptable environmental and economic cost of the redundant systems - almost always involving fossil fuels despite endless bullshit from badly educated airheads carrying on about batteries, and worse, hydrogen.
I personally include in my self declared environmentalism a preference for this:
...as opposed to this:
Residents feel trapped and choked by dust, while experts warn environmental damage is ‘solving one problem by creating others’
Fuck off Ayn Rand.
The solar cells at the Desert Sun Solar facility are cadmium telluride solar cells, with cadmium and tellurium both being toxic elements, although it must be said that CdTe is generally insoluble except when exposed to acid - which may include stomach acid - whereupon highly toxic H2Te may be generated, and cadmium, which features toxicity very similar to that of mercury. One therefore hopes that a wind storm in the increasingly destablized weather systems now observed don't tear the shit out of this obscene monstrosity and areosolize Cadmium Telluride dust.
Someday all of this garbage, at quantities of millions of tons, will need to be hauled away:
Pedro Amado Petroli, Priscila Silva Silveira Camargo, Rodrigo Andrade de Souza, Hugo Marcelo Veit, Assessment of toxicity tests for photovoltaic panels: A review, Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry, Volume 47, 2024, 100885
From the article's conclusions:
Have a swell day, and enjoy, if you are doing so, participating the consumer shopping festival connected with the curious, but wildly popular, worship of a baby.