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I'm well aware that France has nuclear reactors, and probably I should have mentioned that, but didn't want to get to into the weeds about a side point. France is very much an outlier and Europe, and their fleet of reactors was mostly built in the 80s and 90s, and it was built mostly to serve their own national needs, not to be the powerhouse for all of Europe. They can export some energy, but not nearly enough to power the continent.
I also don't think the solar situation is at all comparable to China. Europe is significantly further north than China, like 10 degrees or more, with only the northern parts of China overlapping with the southern parts of Europe. That massively increases the seasonality problems of solar. Building solar panels in Spain to export energy all the way out to Germany, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe doesn't seem like a real solution, even if you ignore the difficulty of crossing multiple international borders. I know they've gotten some energy from solar and wind, and that's great, but they haven't increased capacity nearly as much as they would need to "just stop burning oil," let alone the natural gas they import.
None of this is to say that Europe is doomed, or anything, it's just that they're facing strong headwinds in energy that will limit their growth. Meanwhile in the US we just have a huge abundance of seemingly every source of energy.
That's true, there's also not nearly enough transmission capacity installed for them to literally do that. But still, that's a lot of base load taken care of. France exports about 17% of the total electricity it generates. So on average, around 10 of those nukes permanently power its neighbors (and peaks go significantly higher, of course).
You can just look that up. The world bank has a pretty through study on the solar potential of different countries. They made a nice map to show the results and published their methods. Inner Mongolia is less than 10% better for solar than Spain, and has similar seasonality. The better regions are thousands of kilometer further west, and have "challenging terrain" (lots of mountains).
Yeah, they basically have to roof over half of Spain, and quickly, if they stay committed to the current strategy - but they could do just that, and indeed have started to do so. It's the cheapest way to make power, after all, they just need to invest. And I wasn't joking about the DC subsea cables. They're already building the first one, to France. The EU is investing in GW scale DC power lines to strengthen the internal electricity market between direct neighbors.
And that's just par for the course with large scale solar. China is miles ahead with doing all that, and the US will also have to put up many GW of new transmission capacity towards the East Coast. Solar has gotten to cheap not to do that. The alternative is to just move all the data centers, aluminum smelters, ect. to where the panels are. We'll certainly see both.
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A lot of countries have nuclear reactors and plans to build more. It's only really Germany that has major energy issues and lacks credible plans to deal with it (even if this bleeds over into other places) .
Poland is about to get its first, I believe, and Czechia is expanding theirs.
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