Technology

Solar is already pretty popular in a lot of places, we're going to have to start building out grid-scale storage and increased transmission capability between the different countries of the EU now if we want to be truly independent of fossil fuels without spending a quadrillion euros on nuclear plants everywhere.

I live far enough north that in the summer we peak at 18 glorious hours of daylight. Electricity prices go negative at times, you have to stop selling to the grid or you'll lose money. But if you've got 18 hours of summer daylight, that means you have 18 hours of pitch black in the winter. The sun rises so low over the horizon that on the few days that it isn't overcast, solar panels barely produce anything. Solar doesn't produce anything for about 2-3 months. The difference as measured by a company doing home solar installations, is about 30x between the best and worst month. That's a company that wants to sell you solar, so they're not likely to overstate the reduction of efficiency in the winter.

We're then dependent on our fossil plants (somewhat unreliable), wind (somewhat unpredictable) and Finnish nuclear plants - but those power us through the underwater ESTLINK cables and those don't have enough bandwidth for heavy consumption periods, nor can the Finns sell everything they generate to us... And worst of all, some of that sweet nuclear power gets passed on to Latvia and Lithuania too. Oh and this is winter, where a lot of people need to run our heat pumps full blast at significantly reduced efficiency over spring/autumn time.

But at the same time, southern Europe isn't affected as much by the lower solar angles and shorter days. There's a reduction in generation for sure, but not comparable to northern Europe. If that electricity made its way here, we wouldn't have to run our fossil plants as much in the winter. With enough storage, perhaps it could even be enough to last through cold winter nights as well.