[eldaisfish]

every single one of Ember's analyses are based on historical situations. That is certainly useful, and serves to demonstrate an important point - that wind and solar make economic sense.

There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate.

You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.

This is exactly where nuclear shines, because although it is expensive, it insulates a country against the vagaries of external forces. Whether or not that guarantee is worth the price tag is the question a lot of governments are grappling with and they mostly seem to agree that the value is indeed worth the cost.

[bryanlarsen]

> You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.

Yes, these are things we know with a high degree of statistical confidence. Many locations have hundreds of years of hourly weather records.

We know that Europe has never had an hour where there wasn't significant sun or significant wind somewhere on the continent any hour in the past 30+ years. The same can be said for North America, and Asia.

[eldaisfish]

way to miss the point.

What use is hundreds of hours of weather records when the climate is changing in ways we do not yet understand?

"somewhere" on the continent being windy is useless unless we have the transmission capacity to move that much power across thousands of kilometres. See also what just happened in australia last week - nearly 40% of the country stuck with very low wind speeds for nearly a week. What then?

[dalyons]

They mostly don’t seem to agree, as exhibited by the fact that virtually none of them are breaking ground on new nukes.