Thankfully you can built 4GW of renewables for the price of 1GW of nuclear lol. Don’t need to store the energy, just build more generation capacity to offset lower winter production.
Still cheaper, and getting cheaper. Don’t ignore wind power too.
"Just build more" would work better if the production wasn't so unbalanced. 70% of the production is done during 6 months and it's 3% in December and January. Being mere 4 times cheaper than nuclear (in the short term) isn't nearly enough to counterbalance that. If it would be 20 times cheaper it would start to make more sense for a winter load.
> Still cheaper, and getting cheaper. Don’t ignore wind power too.
Wind is even worse than solar in this aspect, it can be down unpredictability and unlike solar, is closed to the maximum theoretical efficiency already anyways which means the only thing you can do is count on the economy of scale.
And before people tell me that it usually produces more in winter, yes it does, until it doesn't like the 3 weeks wind anomaly we had two years ago in the EU with close to no production.
I'm not predicting future tech of course, it's possible that "just build more" will work in the future, for now it doesn't though and from a large margin.
Wind is better if you actually build offshore, which for some reason is very underinvested. We should have 100s of GWs in offshore power in Europe now. The fact that UK does not have even 100GW is a shame.
To calculate the energy produced by a 1 GW solar power plant during a winter month in Germany, we need to consider a few factors:
1. *Solar Insolation*: The average solar energy received per day in winter.
2. *Day Length*: Winter days are shorter, so there's less daylight for solar panels to operate.
3. *Panel Efficiency*: The efficiency of the solar panels in converting sunlight to electricity.
4. *Weather Conditions*: Overcast days are common in winter, which can reduce solar panel output.
Let's make some assumptions for a rough estimate:
- *Solar Insolation*: In Germany, the winter solar insolation is roughly 1.5 kWh/m²/day.
- *Day Length*: We'll assume an average of 8 hours of effective daylight in winter.
- *Panel Efficiency*: Modern solar panels are about 15-20% efficient. Let's use 18%.
- *Weather Conditions*: We'll assume that overcast conditions reduce effective insolation by 25%.
Now, let's calculate:
1. The daily energy output (in kWh) = 1 GW * 8 hours * 18% efficiency * 75% weather factor.
2. Multiply this by the number of days in a month (30 days for simplicity).
A 1 GW solar power plant in Germany could produce approximately 32.4 million kWh (or 32.4 GWh) of energy during a typical 30-day winter month, considering the factors and assumptions outlined earlier.
Hit me up in 2040 when Poland’s first nuclear power plant finally opens a decade behind schedule snd costing the usual ~10x of the estimate.
You do so much assumptions yet they don't match reality _at all_.
>A 1 GW solar power plant in Germany could produce approximately 32.4 million kWh (or 32.4 GWh) of energy during a typical 30-day winter month, considering the factors and assumptions outlined earlier.
Okay, so this means on average 1GW of solar power should output ~1GWh of energy daily, right? So Germany's roughly 80GW of power would produce on average 80GWh of electricity? Well, let's look at _real_ data: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
In the last 30 days there was exactly one day with over 80GWh of solar power produced: 9th January. And it was just 81GWh. Yet there was multiple days where actual electricity produced barely went over 10GWh... or not even 10GWh, like 21 December with 7GWh produced. Three days ago, it was 14,5GWh.
Overall solar power production in Germany in December was 795GWh, below 1/3 of your estimate.
Still cheaper, and getting cheaper. Don’t ignore wind power too.