Top Solar Power Plants

<i>A solar thermal power plant may also be referred to as a solar photovoltaic power plant.</i><p>Uh, no? According to my 6-year-old&#x27;s copy of &quot;Stuff You Should Know!&quot; [1] those are, like, opposites? Very confusing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Stuff-Should-Know-Howard-Hughes&#x2F;dp&#x2F;178493299X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Stuff-Should-Know-Howard-Hughes&#x2F;dp&#x2F;17...</a>

What I find noteworthy and maybe isn&#x27;t appreciated enough is how many of these large solar installations are in countries like India or China.<p>You may implicitly think that these would be in the richest countries, but apparently they are not. (Granted China and India have good conditions for Solar, but so do parts of the US and Australia.)

Lately I have been surprised at how much solar and wind play the main role in most reports building pathways to carbon neutrality.<p>I always believed that the intermittency of solar and wind would be too problematic and that&#x27;s why people advocated for nuclear energy. However in most recent pathways stamped as &quot;realistic&quot;, it seems that nuclear stays pretty much at its current level and solar and wind grows exponentially.<p>Is intermittency and dispatchability a problem we can really overcome with DC long transmission lines, synthetic gaz, smarter energy consumption and batteries?<p>I have a hard time understanding to which extent each of those solutions can help solve the dispatch problem. I would love to be pointed out to some good up-to-date resources that go in-depth into that topic.

It don&#x27;t really care about nameplate power let alone the area covered. Capacity factor is really not relevant either as it doesn&#x27;t factor in the instantaneous market demand for power. What I&#x27;d really like to see is some kind of metric describing how much of power-demanded was actually covered by the facility at the right time.<p>This would make it much easier to compare intermittent energy sources with more stable ones. We always end up with MWh&#x2F;$, but it feel that is hiding the true cost of solar and wind.

The largest Chinese plant is a lot smaller than the largest Indian plant, but produces nearly as much power - any insight why?