Now, this is how a good discussion can be had. Not diverting into irrelevant crap but actually asking the commenter to justify the claim --something I will gladly do here.

NOTE: Breaking this into parts because of post limits.

---------------- Power and Energy ----------------

First things first, we have to be careful not to mix energy with power. We all do it out of convenience, yet they are very different things. The differences also affect system-wide technology and economics.

Since I can't assume the audience is entirely technical, here's a reasonable analogy for power and energy:

Your garden hose is a low power source of water when compared to a firehose. Anyone understands that a firehose can deliver a lot more water per second than a garden hose.

Energy is like the amount of water you need to fill-up a swimming pool. You can fill it up with a garden hose, but it could take days. If you use a high power fire hose you might be able to fill up the same swimming pool in seconds.

The water distribution infrastructure currently installed in any city is designes such that every home (or a reasonable number of homes) can use their garden hoses and they will all have acceptable flow rates.

If every home in a city was specified to have a fire hose, the size and scale of the water distribution systems would be absolutely massive when compared to what we have today.

One way to think of this is that power determines how quickly you can deliver energy. Water flow rate determines how quickly you can fill-up your swimming pool.

---------------- The Solar Panel ----------------

What are the realities of a solar panel? Sure, you buy a 325 W panel. Great. How does that behave in the real world, in the context of a system?

There are several variables that affect the output of a solar panel:

- Mounting angle
- Variation of solar radiation based on time of day
- Weather (clouds, rain, etc.)
- Dirt
- Negative temperature coefficient
- Wiring losses
- Energy conversion losses
- Degradation over time

I could write pages on the above. I'll limit myself to a couple of elements that have the most impact on power production.

---------------- The Solar Parabola ----------------

If you look at the output of a fixed solar array, regardless of scale, rooftop or megawatt, it will look like an inverted parabola. Here's a picture of that from my 13 kW array:

https://i.imgur.com/Fl8ARJd.png

This is from March of this year. It should be noted that it never reached 13 kW, it peaked at about 10 kW. This is important, but I'll skip over it for now.

A nuclear power plant, over the same period of time, would produce constant power for 24 hours. If we are going to scale it down to this graph, we would get 10 kW every second of the day for the full 24 hours.

The first thing we need to calculate, then, is the ratio between full power for the solar period vs. what the equivalent nuclear source would deliver.

The way you calculate this is to integrate the curves over the period of interest, say from 8 AM to 8 PM. You are comparing the area of a rectangle to that of the parabola that fits within it.

The answer to this is surprisingly simple: The ratio is 2/3. In other words, a solar system --of any scale-- rated at the same peak power as a nuclear power plant, will, at best, produce 2/3 (66%) the energy over the same period of time under --and this is important-- ideal conditions.

Just using this number, we can calculate that we need to build a 1.5 GW solar array in order to match the daylight energy output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

---------------- Power at Night ----------------

That covers you for 12 hours. What do we do for the other half of the day? Batteries, of course.

Well, we need extra energy to pump into the batteries so we can use it at night. The 1.5 GW is used-up. If we keep that math simple, that means we need to double our power production capacity.

Now we are up to a 3 GW peak power solar system in order to be able to match the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

I won't cover the cost, scale and realities of such a massive energy storage installation at this time, just remember this is very much a part of the reality of solar --and a very significant one at that.

---------------- Conversion Efficiency ----------------

What I will talk about is the fact that solar arrays require the power conversion systems in order to move energy in and out of batteries and even out to the grid. Current battery charging technologies are nearly 100% efficient, so I'll ignore the small losses incurred going in and out of a battery and over time (self discharge).

In order to get in and out of the buildings full of battery packs you will need to use conversion equipment. This will cost about 20% of the energy you produce. Yes, 20% of what you produce will be converted into heat. At the peak of 3 GW, we would be producing 0.6 GW in heat. That's no joke. That's nearly the peak output of a nuclear facility being used to create heat. I won't get into what this might mean in terms of having to provide for cooling. I don't know how this is handled at such massive scales. I just know that 0.6 GW of heat producing power is a very serious number.

OK, this means that our system now needs to be upsized yet again in order to compensate for the 20% conversion loss.

3 GW * (1/0.8) = 3.75 GW

That's where we are: Without considering other factors, the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant requires 3.75 GW peak power and a train-load of batteries.

Are we done? No, not even close.