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Comment by usefulcat | Hacker News Reader

> A proposed solar farm on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation will have 2.2 million solar panels

> Annual capacity is estimated to be about 756 megawatts.

756 MW/year = ~2 MW/day = less than 1 watt per day per panel?

I get that the sun doesn't shine 24/7, but even so that seems way off. What am I missing? Maybe the 756 MW figure is daily instead of annual?

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The article is bad, as so often happens with units... The project site: https://www.sunbearproject.com/

971MW, producing up to 1700 to 2400 GWh/year.

That puts it at 2471 hours/year of full-power production equivalent, or 28%. That's good - it's a nice area for solar.

The average solar power purchase agreement is $49 per megawatt hour¹. That is $49,000 per GWh. So if this plant can produce 1700 gigawatt hours per year then they would be able to earn on the order of $83,000,000 annually. Not too shabby.

(1)- https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-wind-renewable-energy...

Watts are a rate (energy/time), you don't need to divide them by time again.

MW is power, MWh is energy. So annual should be 7564.5365 MWh

You can escape your * with a \.

Ah, thank you

756 MW is the peak power rate, not accumulated amount of power that will be generated per year.

756MW of capacity will produce ~3,024 MWH per day

“756MW of annual capacity” doesn’t make sense, given that MW is a measure of instantaneous power. They might mean that the average daily peak output over the whole year is 756MW?

Should be more like 756 GWh

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