alt Hacker NewsSolar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
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> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
We have statistics on solar performance at the huge countries levels. And it shows that, in reality, we're talking about 20x overbuild. Not 3x and not even 10x. And there is no way around it.
Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.