You wrote that "solar and wind" can drop "to 5% capacity for weeks at a time", and I ask for the source of this, in order to check that if, contrary to all scientific studies, it is true for a mix (wind, solar...) deployed on whole continent. Guess what? It isn't! Check "How synchronous is wind energy production among European countries?" (Monforti, Gaetani, Vignati). This is also true in China (check Liu, Xiao Wang, Dai, Qi "Analysis on the hourly spatiotemporal complementarities between China's solar and wind energy resources spreading in a wide area") and America ("Is it always windy somewhere? Occurrence of low-wind-power events over large areas" (Handschy, Rose, Apt).)

> Daunkelflaute

It's "Dunkelflaute" (only one 'a')

"a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours" and "more than two days over most of Europe happen about every five years" (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute ), here is for your "weeks at a time". Moreover regions outside North of Europe are way less impacted.

> are used for very low scale grid management

And what exactly forbids to manage all local grids this way? This is more and more true, as being able to isolate a local grid is useful.

> The only large scale tech to store electricity are dams

As of 2022, the total combined energy capacity of electric vehicle (EV) batteries sold in Europe reached approximately 690 GWh, and grows very quickly.

Note: dams are a renewable source.

> The only exisitng gas plant stil used before 2010

It is about fossil fuel, and factually the French nuclear fleet always used some: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+...

> hundred billions on new renewables alone

With a clearly promising result: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

> (roughly half of the total cost of the nuclear grid)

This is highly debatable as the real total cost of the nuclear fleet is disputed. Remember: EDF's debt now surpasses 50 billion €...

> It's true that the results look even worse than the EPR though

Source? Reality: the French EPR should have started around 2012 and didn't (right now) did so, while https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...