[euroderf]

As I understand it, Finland needs nuclear for the long midwinter spells where there is no wind to speak of and the sun is too low to generate much solar. It's a textbook case of gaps in renewables.

That being said, Finland has a wild excess of solar energy in the summer, and I'd like to see the gov't get serious about nationwide schemes to store up that energy for wintertime use. Air-water heat pumps, sand batteries, it's a start... capture that summer heat and squirrel it away.

[pydry]

Winter is when their wind turbines will be producing hardest.

Periods with low wind and low sun do happen but theyre rarer and shorter than people think. It's much more common that availability of wind and sun anticorrelate (even in winter), which is why the storage needed to get to 99% is normally measured in hours rather than days.