Wind + solar is just adding another failure mode for when there is no wind. There are many places without adequate wind speed. Nuclear does not care about either, and has the highest energy density on top of that.
Nuclear has its own failure modes. In Switzerland, one of the nuclear plants will be offline for winter (!) due to "unplanned repairs". This will cost the owners of the plant millions.
Nuclear also have weather failures: low water levels, and high river temperature. In both cases the power plant needs to reduce output or be turned off.
Those aren't weather failures but environmental regulations, there's nothing preventing the plant to work of you really want to, it's just not needed, especially in summer.
If you remove environmental regulations, then (pumped) hydro, wind, and photovoltaics would also be much cheaper, and much faster to build. For windmills, it's birds and whatnot, for photovoltaics (specially large-scale in the mounts) it's wildlife and other environmental impact.
Yes, but those are still different from weather failures. When there's no sun and no wind, you can do whatever you want with regulations, you can't bring it back. Weather failure is something unique to renewables on top of everything else.
FUD about "what about where renewables aren't available " is just rhetorical handwaving. The answer, which already exists at nation-level scale is storage and infrastructure.
The increase in renewable generation is great, but some of these are kind of cheating by importing energy to cover shortfalls. You need some kind of baseload generation that’s not dependent on weather, and borrowing this from a neighbour while pretending you don’t need it is like those ‘tiny house’ guys.
Now you're just empirically lying, by equating the behaviour of solar and wind with that of hydro.
That table also doesn't say what you apparently think it does: it lists Luxembourg as 89% renewable, which is true, but does not include that Luxembourg only covers about 28% of the electricity it uses, and imports the rest.
Thus Luxembourg's production being 89% renewable is worthless information as to the viability and reliability of wind and solar for baseload: Luxembourg relies on its neighbours for reliable electricity supply.
right, there's a vibrant international real time energy market with thousands of km of energy travel on the GW scale which also invalidates the "what if it's cloudy right where I am" argument.
That's genuinely not how it works. You can see it every spring as Germany wholesale prices go negative to try and offload as much electricity as fast as possible to keep their grid from falling over.
Wind turbines can, and are, turned off (by turning, feathering the blades, and braking). There are two main cases: high wind / storm, and too much electricity in the grid. Photovoltaics can also be turned off.
The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators, eg. nuclear and coal, because they can't easily (cheaply) ramp down or shut off. Sometimes it is cheaper to let prices go negative than to use emergency mechanisms (that do exist).
Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in. Specially, a negative price does not mean the grid is melting.
'Too much electricity in the grid' is a wrong way of expressing it, just like you can't have 'too much fluid in a pipe'. What happens is that the line voltage creeps up because loads are lagging further behind compared to generation.
And like you wrote, that's controlled. Agreed with the rest of your comment, especially the bit that pricing is mostly controlled by the worst parties, not by the best. What we are simply finding out is that a grid designed mostly for baseline loads needs fast response generation (for instance: half of the UK putting their kettle on during half time requires so much extra power that pumped storage becomes a good alternative). And conversely, that if you change the mix considerably that you're going to have to have more control over the cumulative effect of many smaller generators.
But there are already standards for dealing with that even absent remote control of resources: as soon as the local grid voltage that the inverters in modern wind and solar plants see exceeds a very specific maximum for a proscribed period of time they fully autonomously back off their capacity until they are well below those maximums again, and then slowly ramp up to avoid causing grid instability due to oscillation.
What grid balancing is all about is to make this all financially optimal, it has relatively little to do with the safety of the grid, it is simply a way to extract maximum capacity without affecting that safety. A coarser mechanism would simply incur some more waste, but given the amounts of money involved it pays off to tune this.
That’s very interesting, but as a counter point, it seems that the major spain blackout was partially caused by such a voltage increase that was not mitigated properly.
So yes there are mitigations but it still is a major cause of concern I think
> Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in.
Maybe that'll happen, but currently such events only keep increasing in frequency (https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/26/germany-records-453-h...), and as neighbours also install more solar and wind the ability for germany to maintain their grid stability through exports is going to worsen not improve.
Your own link shows coal, gas and biomass production as flat throughout a day while solar ramps up and "crushes the grid"? They all pay a price for doing so when cheaper cleaner energy is avaialable and they presumably find it a better choice than ramping down their boilers.
Why do market based financial incentives to shift demand and balance supply and demand freak you out so much?
Do you have the same visceral reaction to cheap prices used to shift demand towards overnight periods for nuclear? The frequency of that increased as people built nuclear too. Some even spent millions on storage systems to take advantage of it.
That's genuinely exactly how it works. There are companies that provide that offloading-as-a-service who make good money on this concept and the grid isn't anywhere near falling over. Your 'grid melting' comment upthread is nonsense. Nothing is melting.
Melting would imply that currents exceed rated capacity of the lines that is entirely impossible due to how the grid is set up. What does happen is that loads that are otherwise not economical to run get turned on and that sources that are remote controllable (which is all wind installations > 2 MW and all solar farms > 10 KW except for residential) are switched off. This is a fascinating subject and worth some study, the thing you want to read up on is called grid balancing.
Typically the day-ahead and the 15 minute ahead markets take care of this with pricing alone and there have been no meaningful excursions due to overproduction of renewables, that's just FUD and it does not contribute to the discussion.
What you could argue if you had read up on this is that there are market operators that do both sides of the market, which sets you up for an Enron like situation because they can make money by front-running. After all, they have a little bit of time between the moment where they know what they're going to do and the moment when they actually do it. Market makers that are also traders is always a dangerous combination and this has already led to some trouble, especially early on in the energy balancing market process. Now it is much better.
Nuclear has its own failure modes. In Switzerland, one of the nuclear plants will be offline for winter (!) due to "unplanned repairs". This will cost the owners of the plant millions.