Capacity Factor & LCOE Explorer

Renewable comparison tables list a levelized cost and a capacity factor for each technology, but those two numbers are entangled: the quoted cost only holds if the plant actually delivers its rated capacity factor. This simulator renders five real power sources — solar PV, onshore wind, offshore wind, hydro and geothermal — each producing a physically distinct output curve (solar's day/night cycle, wind's gusty mean-reverting noise, hydro and geothermal's near-baseload steadiness), streams the resulting energy as 3D packets to a grid collector at a rate proportional to instantaneous megawatts, and recomputes the realized capacity factor and effective cost per delivered megawatt-hour live as weather variability and plant size change.