Of course solar and wind are awesome, but they are dependent on external factors and thus not fully comparable. If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. Nuclear and fuel-burning power plants are not like that, and the difference matters.
You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
There are (at least) 6 solutions for the sun not shining.
In order of desirability.
1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix.
2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper.
4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit.
5: batteries
6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.
No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough.
> You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun,
And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines.
Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there.
And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term.
> or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times.
And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field.
I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.
You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)