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Comment by fi358 | Hacker News Reader

7 hours of storage might work in a country like Australia, but not necessarily in some other countries. For example, in Finland winter is several months long and during that time PV will produce almost no electricity. During winter there may also be relatively long periods with only a little wind.

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As I understand it, Finland needs nuclear for the long midwinter spells where there is no wind to speak of and the sun is too low to generate much solar. It's a textbook case of gaps in renewables.

That being said, Finland has a wild excess of solar energy in the summer, and I'd like to see the gov't get serious about nationwide schemes to store up that energy for wintertime use. Air-water heat pumps, sand batteries, it's a start... capture that summer heat and squirrel it away.

Winter is when their wind turbines will be producing hardest.

Periods with low wind and low sun do happen but theyre rarer and shorter than people think. It's much more common that availability of wind and sun anticorrelate (even in winter), which is why the storage needed to get to 99% is normally measured in hours rather than days.

Finland also has a lot of hydro which countries drenched in sunshine usually do not.

With draughts becoming more common due to climate change, why should Finland rely on a solution that is going to be less reliable going forward?

Finland only has 60 hydro power stations over 10MW, only ten of those are over 100MW and they all are under 200MW.

It’s nowhere enough and there aren’t any places to build more.

For reference current energy production is 7500MW in Finland.

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