China’s wind farms can now produce more energy than all of America’s nuclear plants

I know the formatting is horrible, but just follow the link to see a nicely presented table.

You have to do more than just look at that initial table though, you have to read the notes under them as well, for example wind & solar costs are NOWHERE NEAR "uniform" across the entire country, to wit:

As mentioned above, the LCOE values shown in Table 1 are national averages. However, as shown in Table 2, there is significant regional variation in LCOE values based on local labor markets and the cost and availability of fuel or energy resources such as windy sites. For example, LCOE for incremental wind capacity coming online in 2019 ranges from $71.3/MWh in the region with the best available resources in 2019 to $90.3/MWh in regions where LCOE values are highest due to lower quality wind resources and/or higher capital costs for the best sites that can accommodate additional wind capacity. Costs shown for wind may include additional costs associated with transmission upgrades needed to access remote resources, as well as other factors that markets may or may not internalize into the market price for wind power.

Plus one needs to understand the terminology -- per example even those so called "low quality wind" locations are still PRETTY DAMNED WINDY -- they are not the average "backyard" of mid-America. And of course the wind doesn't vary just on some regular daily cycle, but there may be times when there is insufficient wind (to generate ANY power whatsoever) for weeks at a time... which means "backup" capacity (generally fossil-fuel powered) MUST be built, or else massive brownouts and even multi-day blackouts could result.*

And the same caveats apply to solar as well; there are many locations where there are not only major seasonal variations due to short winter days, low angle winter sun; but also where local weather & climate (significant cloudy days, etc) and other factors (snow cover, etc) dramatically reduce the net output (and thus significantly increase the cost) of solar PV.


* And generally speaking ONLY people who have actually worked with, or lived with (i.e. off grid) these kinds of systems really COMPREHEND what that means as far as impact on daily living (i.e. ZERO power also means no central heat, and no readily available water, no cooking, no refrigertion, etc -- not to mention that on a larger/longer scale communications would go down as well -- basically just a few days of blackout and you quickly revert to what is virtually a pre-industrial state).

/r/technology Thread Link - qz.com