There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.
What should one do then? Just shut everything down?
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
Lol-ed hard... If we look only at modern generation of tech, Gen3 nuclear plants are the safest source of power
All the places that can use hydro already do. Oh, and it's pretty damaging to the environment, it turns out.
Wind and solar are pretty cool, but also unreliable, so it's not so clear that they're really cheaper after you account for overprovisioning and storage costs.
If only there was a safe and reliable source of energy we could use to complement them...
