[lokimedes]

It don't really care about nameplate power let alone the area covered. Capacity factor is really not relevant either as it doesn't factor in the instantaneous market demand for power. What I'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.

This would make it much easier to compare intermittent energy sources with more stable ones. We always end up with MWh/$, but it feel that is hiding the true cost of solar and wind.

[ncmncm]

Solar/wind with plenty of storage is the future.

At the moment, generating-capacity without storage is equally as useful as with, so putting money into storage now would be wasteful, vs. getting correspondingly more absolute generating capacity online: each panel added displaces an exactly-known rate of carbon release.

Storage costs are plummeting even faster than solar generating capacity, so the longer you put off building out storage, the cheaper it will be when you do. By the time solar generating capacity is large enough that its variability could be a problem, storage will be mature and cheap, and storage buildout will ramp up. In the meantime, just a small amount of storage can take away all the profit from gas plants.