What is installed in one year has little relevance to what eventual installed capacity will be for solar/wind/nuclear. Once solar/wind becomes a larger amount of installed capacity the immense problems with storage will likely become a huge limiting factor. Have you considered how much storage poland (or any country with large seasonal variation in sun/wind) would actually need for having 50% of it's capacity in solar?

> Funny you should say that: Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.

It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.

Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.

On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.

>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.

Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.

The batteries are going to get better and cheaper so much faster than you think. It will seem obvious in hindsight!

5.3GW global nuclear power capacity globally seems off. Individual plants are on the order of 1-5GW

edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience

> Poland installed 4.9 GW of solar in 2022 [0] compared to 5.3 GW capacity (nominal) of nuclear connected to the grid worldwide in 2021[1].

This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.

That's a political choice being made by those who oppose renewables. It's not a limitation of the technology.

It's not opposition, it's just not overpaying any more.