Nuclear is nice on paper but totally bonkers once you look at the numbers. And they aren't even accounting for all costs, e.g. insurance and long term waste storage are heavily subsidized.
- interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)
- spread turbines across the entire country
- build as much PV as possible (there is plenty of space on roofs)
- combine renewables with hydro storage
- (in a few places) generate hydrogen and store for times where wind & sun are not enough. Doesn't have to be pure hydrogen, converting to methane or better yet ammonia)
There is effectively 0 sun during the winter in Finland.
Just go to https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... and look at last year Decemenber or January.
> - interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)
Until they don't because the country 10x your size with massive heavy industry on the other side of that country you want to import from wants to buy all of it.
PV produces absolutely nothing when electricity is most used and absolutely necessary (midwinter).
Hydro capacity in Finland is at its maximum potential and even now cannot make up for times when wind is producing close to nothing.
Also, all these workarounds cost money -- some of them, lots of it. For TVO, Olkiluoto 3 costs roughly 5B euros for 1.6GW of nuclear.
If you are going to interconnect with solar and wind you have to spread it across multiple countries. Of course we are seeing how well that worked out with gas and Russia right now.
Deploying such a high number of wind turbine might not be so easy since usually nobody wants them close by and even if Finland is vast not all space is probably suitable.
Nuclear is far from perfect but at least it’s low co2 and once built cost are usually stable (uranium price is negligeable).
You probably meant their output is unpredictable. But even this is wrong, since weather forecasts allow for a very predictable output.
Nuclear is neither - it requires extensive maintenance (see France), and they can go out unpredictably, taking out a lot of capacity at an instant (see France).
And turbines also take a lot less space than say parking lots.
And then we would also would have had to build ~8GW of new gas/oil/coal plants or dam more rivers for hydro.
Electricity is used for heating in Finland. Not having enough electricity in the winter is not an option. We need ~9GW of constant production with peaking to around 13GW to survive winters.
edit: Or some absolutely insane amounts of storage to store a week or two of that ~8GW to handle the worst case scenarios.