There's still the storage and base load problem. But I am 100% with you that we shouldn't slow solar in deference to nuclear; what we should be doing is mapping out what we want our next generation energy mix to look like (solar, wind, pumped storage, nuclear, geothermal, etc) on a regional basis, stop fucking around and arguing about it, and just get on with building it.
I live in an area (Canadian prairies) where max energy consumption lines up with with minimum solar and wind production (-40C in December on a calm night). Even during the day, those calm bitterly cold days only have about 8 hours of sunlight from a sun that barely comes over the horizon. We're starting to build solar, we've had wind for a while, but even though we've committed to building SMR Nuclear, we're still in a situation where we've got coal and natural gas plants that are approaching EOL and they'll likely be replaced/retrofitted to burn more fossil fuels because we won't have any sufficiently reliable baseload ready.
And BC has tons of hydro.
So build out enough renewables to supply BC when the sun is shining, maybe even enough to pump some water uphill, and then have BC hydro supply the prairies at other times.
863 m^3 of natural gas -> ~9100 kWh of heating energy
Assuming (generously) that I can get a COP of 3, even though that’s unrealistic at the miserable temperatures we had over the last few months, that’s ~3000 kWh for electric heat pump heat.
Electricity was about 745kWh for the month, so 3750kWh total between heat pump heating and electricity.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma... shows 3.5kWh/mo/m^2 for December and 4.4kWh/mo/m^2 for January. Let’s go with January to be generous.
3750kWh/mo / 4.4kWh/mo/m^2 = 852 m^2 = 9170 sq.ft. of solar required to cover both my electricity and heating needs.
If I look at just electricity it’s a lot easier. 745 / 4.4 = 169m^2 = 1800 sq.ft. which is essentially the same footprint as the house. Heating completely kills it though and is, I suspect for most people, an even larger source of carbon than their electricity use. At least looking at those two bills, there’s an $88 carbon tax charge on the natural gas bill and only $8 on the electrical bill.
I've got one family member in Saskatchewan with rooftop solar looking at numbers similar to you. Another has 40 acres and a honey operation so just has ground mounted solar and often zeroes his electricity bill even during winter months, although he's still using gas for heating. Just got a heat pump water heater, so he's heading in that direction.
Saskatchewan has lots of land, so we we can do it collectively even if we can't do it ourselves just with roof tops.
As far as the urban spots go, my electricity+gas numbers there approximately match the size of the entire lot. Extrapolating a bit and assuming that my house is “average”, that works out to needing a solar farm about the size of Regina to power the city in the winter. Maybe half the size when considering all of the street area.
As of last year they just give a 25% credit.
I think this is a little misleading, unless there' a good story for storage and long distance power transmission, which I haven't seen yet.
Can small modular reactors like those designed by NuScale do better? Maybe. But we're not going to find out sooner than 2030, which is when NuScale plans to have its first plant operational: https://www.nuscalepower.com/en/about