A lot of readers and commentators misunderstand how intermittent and variable-power sources like wind and solar affect grid economics.



If a state has 100GW peak demand, and it builds, lets say, 120GW capacity nuclear or coal/gas, it is good. But 120GW *peak* capacity wind/solar means the average might be 20-30GW. More like 400GW peak capacity of wind solar is required, and even then there will be dozens of days when conventional backup generation has to be used.



So Germany (and every other country of course) is not nearly finished, even though there is now about 100% peak capacity of wind/solar.



There is more.



The second consequence of this, is that to realize average-case defeating that is "mostly renewable", the will be a large surplus of electricity half the time.



That means whatever the "backup" generation source is, it will have low capacity utilization, and will be facing a much more difficult market. In fact, the whole system probably won't work at all without a "managed" market.



Nuclear, for cost reasons, might not be a good choice for the backup or base capacity, in a heavily developed wind/solar future.



Lastly, if massive scale energy storage technologies materialize, all of this changes. In that case, nuclear is a good choice.