The End of Nameplates?

Last month, I wrote about cleantech's erroneous use of 'nameplates' as a key metric for evaluating the power production of renewable energy power systems. (see Nameplate series here, Part Two, and Part Three.)

Since then, I've had the pleasant surprise of two separate VC meetings in which the investors had gotten to the same place I had... that nameplates were not wholly useful and that yearly power produced was the high order bit. Again, in typical VC tap-dancing fashion, I had to reformat on the fly my cost and ROI modelling to fit their newfound attraction to ypp (yearly power produced).

Interestingly, here is a very good write-up on
France's nuclear power industry,
and what percentage of France's power comes from nuclear power. What's clear to me is that this overly complicated mess could be drastically improved by disregarding installed capacity as a power market statistic. I made similar comments at the end of that post here.