There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems to be doing well, at least.
However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.
France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.
At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
Of those 56 reactors in the entire of 2021 no more than 49 where on online at any time in the same day. 90% of the time it was 46 or less. 16% of days it was 36 or less bottoming out at 28, and everything didn’t suddenly start working in 2022.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
That’s the reality of “dependable” nuclear power, it wants to run 24/7 but can’t run 365.
A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.
Last year, TSMC used 25,000GWh, or 12.5% of Taiwan's electricity, so a 10GW solar project like stated above will take care of it.
If you need dollar figures: Chinese PV prices have dropped to 10 cents/watt while LFP cells are down to $53/kwh. So, $1b will get you 10GW worth of panels, while $4.4b will get you 8 hours of storage. So, roughly $10b to completely go off grid.
So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?
The Russians are managing to bypass restrictions to some degree using their “dark fleet” but that’s oil, and hardly a case of Europe continuing as if nothing were.
One of them, still active until this December when the contract ends, is through Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...
First result is a detailed page from the European Union, showing amongst others a diagram that EU imports from Russia were divided by three.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-suppl...
Of course the EU could lie, but that seems unlikely. It could also be that Russia is selling to the EU without the EU knowing it. For oil that is almost certainly the case to some extent. For LNG you need very specific infrastructure (boats, terminals) that are not compatible with the famous “dark fleet”.
Russia is probably selling the gaz to someone else, or at least trying to. But in that case at a discounted price and with less margin because pipelines cannot be improvised, so they have to use more expensive means of transport.
Mind you those figures were 2023 and they will have reduced even more most likely. But Europe is still buying gaz to some extent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map
Edit: nvm it's not the biggest anymore, but still you need at least 2x to 3x the area to get to 10gw and that's with much better settings that's what Taiwan offers
I also wonder if building for typhoon conditions affects construction costs significantly.
$10b seems impossibly low to go fully off-grid, I expect real estate costs would dwarf panel/battery/construction costs. TSMC isn't stupid, so I assume they've explored the options in this area.
Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1].
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...