50m2 Solar on the roof top of every household would power An average western country. That is not a lot. And that is is an upper band as we have wind power, biomass, hydro power geothermal and many other sources of clean energy.

Offshore wind is getting really cheap and offers vast amount of unused space.

There are western countries with snow in the winter. Also, countries where the majority of population lives in apartments.

Also, how would an average western country power itself at nights, if all it has is 50m2 solar on every roof top?

As I mentioned we got tons of other options besides solar power.

EVs are now increasingly beating gasoline cars on cost of ownership and these often have batteries large enough to store the power required for 4 days of a regular western household.

I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight.

> I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight.

Come to Russia, some place like Yekaterinburg. Or Saint-Petersburg, where the sun can be unseen for months.

Repeating myself for the 3rd time: There are other options beside solar power, so why keep harping on this?

In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind. The UK also gets a lot of their power form wind. For many norther countries, wind power has quite a lot of potential.

> In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind.

Not true. Just 47% [1], and Denmark is a country with the most favorable conditions for wind generation. Statistics are easy to manipulate if you allow yourself to add 15 percent here, subtract 15% there..

Also, Denmark relies on Sweden (who utilize nuclear power a lot) and Norway to provide power when renewables are not providing enough power

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-denmark-wi...

I am talking about 2020:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coronavirus-has-cut-co2...

You refer to 2019 when renewables gave 50% of Danish power.

> Also, Denmark relies on Sweden (who utilize nuclear power a lot) and Norway to provide power when renewables are not providing enough power

Yes, but the capacity for import and export is limited. Despite these limitations Denmark has managed to run on 65% wind power in 2020 without breaking the grid.

Thanks to COVID19 we get a look at the future in terms of how much of electricity production renewables can handle.

This is a nonsense argument. How does the energy density of renewables prevent them from providing all the energy we need? Show us the quantitative argument (spoiler: you will not be able to do so.)

It’s not about total capacity they can provide, it’s how quickly and efficiently they can provide a unit of energy capacity, and how much carbon those materials themselves produce during manufacturing. Nuclear is, across the board, more efficient. Solar simply isn’t efficient enough, strictly speaking in terms of output per unit of input, to generate the energy we will need to reverse climate change and reduce current emissions enough.

Carbon produced during manufacturing is a bad metric right now. If producing a MW of levelized capacity for solar (say) causes emission of twice the CO2 of a MW of nuclear, but displaces much more CO2 of fossil emission per $ invested than nuclear, then going with solar displaces more CO2 than going with nuclear, for a given investment budget.

Also, the CO2 emission is a function of the level of fossil fuel use remaining in the rest of the economy. Transporting materials to the site depends on whether those vehicles are burning fossil fuels or not, for example. The focus on current CO2 from manufacturing is implicitly assuming that we will always need fossil fuels to build these things, that the processes and materials can never be performed/made with non-fossil inputs. With that assumption, we're doomed, so the difference is irrelevant anyway.