The grid is not a network. It's a large single frequency balanced power distribution machine. It is, in and of itself, _the_ single point of failure, and there are significant tradeoffs in having lots of small capacity generators vs. small amounts of large capacity generators connected to it.

There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.

So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.

They are competing because each dollar is spent either on solar and wind or on something else. That dollar spent on solar or wind gets you much more power than any alternative. The advantage increases every year.

If you complete that thought to include both space and time, solar is present only during daylight whereas nuclear is distributed evenly right around the clock.

It's less either|or, more swings|roundabouts.

A pure solar solution requires (on the order of) 2x excess daylight production and 10 hours of offset storage to buffer against the night (and compensate for energy transfer (daylight power -> storage -> night time power) losses).

Solar is great, sure, but there's a long way to go to replace the energy production of fossil fuels, that comes with a lot of reqource mining and waste.

Somewhere in the middle is an optimal solution with much solar and wind, a little bit of nuclear OR gas fired OR <somethig steady> and a whole lot of varied storage (battery + gravity + thermal + green gases).