However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.

France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.

Of those 56 reactors in the entire of 2021 no more than 49 where on online at any time in the same day. 90% of the time it was 46 or less. 16% of days it was 36 or less bottoming out at 28, and everything didn’t suddenly start working in 2022.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...

That’s the reality of “dependable” nuclear power, it wants to run 24/7 but can’t run 365.

At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...

A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.

Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1].

[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...

Last year, TSMC used 25,000GWh, or 12.5% of Taiwan's electricity, so a 10GW solar project like stated above will take care of it.

If you need dollar figures: Chinese PV prices have dropped to 10 cents/watt while LFP cells are down to $53/kwh. So, $1b will get you 10GW worth of panels, while $4.4b will get you 8 hours of storage. So, roughly $10b to completely go off grid.

So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?

The Russians are managing to bypass restrictions to some degree using their “dark fleet” but that’s oil, and hardly a case of Europe continuing as if nothing were.

One of them, still active until this December when the contract ends, is through Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...

First result is a detailed page from the European Union, showing amongst others a diagram that EU imports from Russia were divided by three.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-suppl...

Of course the EU could lie, but that seems unlikely. It could also be that Russia is selling to the EU without the EU knowing it. For oil that is almost certainly the case to some extent. For LNG you need very specific infrastructure (boats, terminals) that are not compatible with the famous “dark fleet”.

Russia is probably selling the gaz to someone else, or at least trying to. But in that case at a discounted price and with less margin because pipelines cannot be improvised, so they have to use more expensive means of transport.

Mind you those figures were 2023 and they will have reduced even more most likely. But Europe is still buying gaz to some extent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park

https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

Edit: nvm it's not the biggest anymore, but still you need at least 2x to 3x the area to get to 10gw and that's with much better settings that's what Taiwan offers

I also wonder if building for typhoon conditions affects construction costs significantly.

$10b seems impossibly low to go fully off-grid, I expect real estate costs would dwarf panel/battery/construction costs. TSMC isn't stupid, so I assume they've explored the options in this area.

So that means in the US you can use renovables and the same space needs to satisfy the demand of 17 times less people than in Taiwan. In other words: it doesn't make any sense in Taiwan.

Also It doesn't make any sense to close your nuclear plants, specially when China could invade you any day of the week and destroy anything you have offshore in hours.

if the US abandons Ukraine support after two years, it would mean that it will abandon Taiwan too. Nuclear deterrent is real.

So are PLAN landing sites. (They’re all in the south.)

Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?

Solar panels are by definition easy to see and thus knock out remotely.

> what do you suggest they do

Nukes. We’ve seen from Ukraine that they’re given special status even in war.

If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.

If you're America, yes. If you're an island nation defending against China one hundred and ten miles away, you don't have the air defence resources to protect your entire island. (And they do have the resources to knock hout hundreds of square kilometres of solar.)

Can you show an existence proof of someone spinning up gigawatts of energy overnight?

And solar doesn't help with night time and batteries haven't hit giagawatt scale yet, you might be a bit over your skiis with your claim here.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

The report is here: https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/...

From the article:

> “The problem with solar in Taiwan is that we don’t have a big area. We have the same population as Australia and use the same amount of electricity, but we are only half the size of Tasmania, and 79 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, so land acquisition is difficult.” Rooftop solar is expensive, and roof space is sometimes needed for other things, such as helicopter pads, public utilities, or water tanks.

the whole country is people living in 10 story apartment buildings. Taiwan looks like this[1], not like suburban Texas where everyone lives in 2k square feet mansions. The very limited roof space/dweller ratio you have in a country like this is indeed used for water storage, helicopter pads, what have you. If you're in a country so sparsely populated where home's are so large that a house can power itself with solar maybe roof solar makes some difference, in a place where you can slap 2 solar panels on a building of 300 people it really doesn't.

[1]https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A9...