It only seems bonkers to you because you're so wildly off the mark. Finland currently has over 4GW of installed wind power capacity, but there have been not just hours but entire days where wind power production has been less than one hundredth of that -- last Thursday's problems were aggravated by such a situation. 9GW of installed capacity will absolutely not guarantee 1GW at all times -- not even close.

few things that help here:

- interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)

- spread turbines across the entire country

- build as much PV as possible (there is plenty of space on roofs)

- combine renewables with hydro storage

- (in a few places) generate hydrogen and store for times where wind & sun are not enough. Doesn't have to be pure hydrogen, converting to methane or better yet ammonia)

> - build as much PV as possible (there is plenty of space on roofs)

There is effectively 0 sun during the winter in Finland.

Just go to https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... and look at last year Decemenber or January.

> - interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)

Until they don't because the country 10x your size with massive heavy industry on the other side of that country you want to import from wants to buy all of it.

Not as much as you'd think. While someone may always have wind or sun, at times that someone is unfeasibly far from Northern Europe. (Low wind conditions in all of Nordics, and to some extent even all over Europe are quite possible.)

PV produces absolutely nothing when electricity is most used and absolutely necessary (midwinter).

Hydro capacity in Finland is at its maximum potential and even now cannot make up for times when wind is producing close to nothing.

Also, all these workarounds cost money -- some of them, lots of it. For TVO, Olkiluoto 3 costs roughly 5B euros for 1.6GW of nuclear.

Those midwinter spells where the sun is shining but it's minus 10 or 20 Celsius and there's no wind.

Maybe all of Finland can be connected, but can you really expect enough wind and solar with just Finland? Doesn't large chunks of Finland have pretty long nights for a decent period of time?

If you are going to interconnect with solar and wind you have to spread it across multiple countries. Of course we are seeing how well that worked out with gas and Russia right now.

So you should add those costs to renwable energy bc wind/pv alone capabilities don't match nuclear, maybe costs would bw not much different, but nuclear run always if build near sea, even when there's no wind or sun

From Finland pov they paid 5.5billion, the rest is on Areva since they had lost the knowledge/expertise on how to build.

Deploying such a high number of wind turbine might not be so easy since usually nobody wants them close by and even if Finland is vast not all space is probably suitable.

Nuclear is far from perfect but at least it’s low co2 and once built cost are usually stable (uranium price is negligeable).

In addition, there are restrictions on the erection of wind turbines in the east due to defense reasons.

Wind turbines also are not 100% reliable and take up a gigantic amount of space.

Are they unreliable? They break down unexpectedly and require a lot of maintenance? I don't think so. Furthermore, when they break the risk is spread out - a whole lot would need to go out at the same time to cause issues.

You probably meant their output is unpredictable. But even this is wrong, since weather forecasts allow for a very predictable output.

Nuclear is neither - it requires extensive maintenance (see France), and they can go out unpredictably, taking out a lot of capacity at an instant (see France).

And turbines also take a lot less space than say parking lots.

Don't you think there will be a problem of place? They occupy lot of space, plus you can't place them where you want

Not really, wind power often occupies space which is otherwise unusued, and it also doesn't render the space unusable for other activities (e.g. offshore wind turbines are not displacing land used for other purposes, and onshore wind turbines on farmland have only a very small impact on the amount of space available for crops and the efficiency of farming).

> up to 8.7GW (and probably never less than 1GW).

And then we would also would have had to build ~8GW of new gas/oil/coal plants or dam more rivers for hydro.

Electricity is used for heating in Finland. Not having enough electricity in the winter is not an option. We need ~9GW of constant production with peaking to around 13GW to survive winters.

edit: Or some absolutely insane amounts of storage to store a week or two of that ~8GW to handle the worst case scenarios.