Do you have sources to back these claims? I'd imagine that somewhere there is always enough wind and sun in Europe.
* wind: wind power production scales with the cube of the wind speed [1], so actual production only occurs about 25% of the time [2]. Also huge areas produce at the same time: the size of the average depression [3] can often be as large as the continent.
* sun: solar panels don't produce at night. I don't think I need to source that claim. Cloudy weather is not good either.
If you want more data, I suggest heading over to https://app.electricitymap.org/map
[1] http://xn--drmstrre-64ad.dk/wp-content/wind/miller/windpower...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-...
[3] https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/...
https://scijinks.gov/solar-energy-and-clouds/
And the nice thing about nights is that they are quite predictable. So not a very difficult problem to solve.
Tesla power wall (I'd argue overpriced...): $10k [1]
Cost of an average nuclear plant today: $20bn [2] (+operating costs)
So you could buy and install 2Mio powerwalls for thr price of one nuclear plant. How many powerwalls (or more cost-effective solutions) would you need to balance the demand vs availability of electricity at night?
1. https://solarmetric.com/learn/tesla-powerwall-review-costs-s...
2. https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cos...
> However, clouds can block light from the sun. So, do clouds affect the creation of energy by solar panels? Yes, but it depends on the types of clouds and where those clouds are in the atmosphere.
> When sunlight hits low clouds, a lot of that light – and heat – is reflected back into space. […] So, if you live in a place that commonly has a lot of low clouds, solar panels might not be able to produce as much energy as they would somewhere else.
——
> And the nice thing about nights is that they are quite predictable. So not a very difficult problem to solve.
Non-sequitur. The fact that it's predictable doesn't mean it's not a difficult problem.
New nuclear reactors are expected to run for 60-100 years.
This is one of the neglected parameters of such calculations. CAPEX for nuclear is high, but the resulting structure is long-lived, much more so than solar panels (25-30 years) or wind turbines (20 years).
The problem with this approach is that you need to overbuild the total installed capacity massively, so that every "somewhere" could, in need, play the role of an energy producing and exporting center for all the other regions.
If 70 % of Europe is calm and dark at one point, the remaining 30 % would need to produce enough energy for the entire continent. (This also means having very high capacity cross-continent links to move that energy around from anywhere to anywhere else. Not easy to build or maintain.)
The most grating thing about the renewable fad is that "herp durp churn out more wind and solar at the margins decentralized" and "massive coordinated grids and/or huge batteries" are utterly different modes of infrastructure production. There is no sense in which getting really good at the former makes one any better at the latter.
Well, except that "ongoing" for nuclear means "100+ years".
https://www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/science-engineering/202...
As for wind, in the UK (it's the country where I know where to find the real-time data easily), wind is only producing about 1/3 of its capacity--about 7GW of 24GW capacity. https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live Overall renewables are generating about 1/4 of total generation.
Point being, most EU countries don't have as much sea to use for wind, so have much lower wind power generation potential.
With wind turbines improving steadily and available in different sizes there is also no big barrier to having them interspersed. Germany or the Netherlands are in large parts densely populated but still manage to put up wind turbines everywhere.