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To reach your value of 36% are you assuming that a gas power plant has a capacity factor of 100%?

Depending on the type of gas power plant the capacity factor could be 56.7%, 13.7%, 13.6% or 18.8% based on https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph....

The energy infrastructure update released in Dec 2022, did not take capacity factor into account - https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-dece..., so this may be the case with the new dataset.



You would not use capacity factor to calculate capacity in the first place, it's the other way around. The 36% guestimate probably comes from somewhere besides these tables. The lower gas capacity factors you quoted are mostly a result of decisions not to run those plants rather than than the energy being intermittently unavailable as happens with solar and wind.

The commenter's point is that although we use the same capacity metric to describe on-demand and intermittently available power generation, it's not meaningful to compare the numbers directly without correction factors.




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