Solar is not controllable. A nuclear power plants scales up or down in less than an hour and works whether it's sunny, rainy, snowing, windy or dry. If you build five times more solar panels, you have five time more panels not running when it's not sunny. We can't store it either, because we would then need to build such large battery farms that it would be both dangerous and impractical. Not to mention that our current batteries have absolutely dreadful efficiencies and lifetimes.
Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.
I think you over-estimate the CO2 emissions for solar panels and under-estimate the complexity of nuclear installations.
A quick google search [1] learns that the CO2 emissions of the solar panel are marginally higher than for a nuclear power plant, but more then 10-fold lower than coal plants. Vattenfall did a study, but it's from 1999, so relies on 20-year old solar technology.
In addition, building a nuclear power plant is amazingly complex. In Europe there are hardly any companies that have the technology and risk-appetite to build one without a solid (financial) support from the government. I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction)
And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
> I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction)
Oh I know. I'm french, the Flamanville EPR is a running joke. But this is merely a consequence of dubious political choices having lead to putting a hold on building nuclear power plants for a long time, which means the people who knew how to do that are either in other companies or retired. There has been a horrible loss of skill in this subject in most of western Europe and the US. We've built dozens of nuclear power plants are are one of the cleanest countries in the world when it comes to CO2 per kWh. I dare say that at one point we definitely understood how to do it.
Korea has demonstrated they have the ability to build multiple third generation reactors in 5 to 6 years. So does China.
> And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
The way the electrical grid is made in Europe is fully made with centralisation in mind. A few core production points distributing to everything else. For this to apply to solar, that would require absolutely gigantic solar parks.
> Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
Except Germany doesn't sell their solar energy. Germany is running on coal and natural gas, producing over 40% of their energy through these means. The absolute insanity of phasing out a solution as effective and safe as nuclear has lead to horribly worse.
> But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather.
How ? solar panels produce a _pitiful_ amount of energy. We would need dozens of millions of them. A small nuclear power plant produces about 10 TWh per year. A well running solar panel produces, if you're lucky, 300kWh per year. Thirty million solar panels, thirty million square meters plus the needed infrastructure, maintenance... for one measly small nuclear power plant.
Wind is not better. Hydraulic is okay, but most countries have run out of space to make dams. Geothermal is very limited.
The environmental cost to do solar at scale is often overlooked, perhaps as great a sin as obscuring the “true cost” of fossil fuels. The cost of production (strip mining, heavy manufacturing), emplacement (concrete, steel, shipping, land clearing), and short lifespan are easily overlooked when the ideal vision seems so juicy. It’s great to augment a house (assuming you own one) with panels, though without substantial subsidies or disposable income in more northern climes the math still doesn’t pencil out as a good return when compared to natural gas. If your only alternative is imported diesel/heating oil, maybe different story, but of course in such places the carbon cost of TCO goes up in tandem with the benefits.
It's not that we couldn't use the excess energy to generate green fuel or green natural gas as storage that we need anyway for the foreseeable future for aviation, remaining ic engines.
Do we wiggle our magic fingers and generate gas out of nowhere ? Renewable gas accounts for about, at best, 10% of gas consumed in a year. As in, that's about as much renewable gas we could make. And it's not exactly an instantaneous process, so we would still be wasting energy. The best existing solution is storing that energy as water that we would pump up a basin, to be released later and used in a dam. That would work, if we did not need to flood areas where major cities are to make it work.
>Do we wiggle our magic fingers and generate gas out of nowhere ? Renewable gas accounts for about, at best, 10% of gas consumed in a year.
If we have excess (more or less free) electricity, i don't think we need magic fingers for this.
Hydro storage is quite expensive and difficult to build, for natural gas there is already a storage and distribution network in place. And it's quite easy tonstore for a long time.
Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.