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Olivia C's avatar

“No country for coal gen” made my day. Thanks for these insights!!

Curious how nuclear will continue to impact overall power mix given gov incentives, DOE’s focus on it, and early days of SMR dev.

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Gregor Macdonald's avatar

Hi Brian. These are some very beautifully designed charts. However, I can't find any corresponding data produced by the EIA that would express generation using a capacity measure, GW. All your charts use the word "generation." But your chosen unit of account is "GW."

Your first chart, for example, portrays total US power generation as traveling along between 450 and 500 GW. There is no data from EIA that confirms this measure. All generation data from EIA is expressed in hours, like MWh, which of course can be easily translated to GWh or TWh. The US power system has been traveling along for years now, producing around 4000 TWh per year. Again, as someone who has used EIA data for 20 years, I am not aware of expressing generation using a capacity unit (whether MW, GW, or TW).

The same observation applies to all your other charts. The coal chart for example, again, expressing generation at a high of 231 GW and the current low at 95 GW. Doesn't correspond to any EIA data.

Can you explain?

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