60% of spinning, so what, they turned stuff off.
your numbers are either a fraud, or a special case.
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US capacity is one million megawatts.
2006 output was 4,064,702 thousand megawatt-hours
there are 8760 hours in a year.
do the math, yearly average load factor is less than 50 percent
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
Um, no, it’s not a fraud, that’s how utilities operate. You have to take power plants down for maintenance, and they fail on their own and create unplanned outages. Just totaling up all possible generation and comparing that to a USA peak demand is pretty simplistic, as best. There are lots of reasons why big chunks of installed generating capacity aren’t available at any given time.
Have you ever worked at an electrical utility? Do you have any sort of engineering background? Have you ever seen a utility VP sweat getting and keeping enough plants online to meet summer demand load? And, again, your 20% figure really doesn’t reflect any sort of applicable reality. Did you even bother to look at those links I posted?
You need to learn to analyze this stuff on your own, and not just believe all the PR from the Greens and the EV people.
Again, I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s not as easy / rosy as you are painting it here.
But peak demand, which is what sets the capacity, is fed by some pretty inefficient stuff, like gas turbines, older plants, etc. You don't want to use that stuff for "base" load, and so a bunch of new plants would be required. Also as the grid gets close to its peak capacity, it gets less stable.
Predicting peak demand was the subject of my Master's Thesis, in 1977 so any conclusions and details are probably OBE. FWIW, the conclusion was that you might be able to usefully predict next summers peak demand, if the weather cooperates.