solarpunk memes

I mean sure, if you’re at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications.

Currently, solar still makes economic sense, but from April to October. Lots of it was built rather fast, now the adoption is slowing since the grid can't accept it everywhere.

Consequently, summer is when oil shale miners rest and prepare for the next season.

Since the goal is to get rid of mining oil shale, big plans exist to install a lot of wind power. Sadly, this has gone embarrassingly slow, and it cannot cover winter consumption, and there is not enough storage.

As a result, some companies and building out storage, but only enough to last a few hours.

...and in the next country southwards, there is a huge gas reservoir that could accept methane, enough to last the whole winter, but nobody has a good enough handle on methanation to renewably produce a considerable quantity and store it there. :o

With regard to reactors, it seems likely that getting one would take 10 years and the local country here doesn't even have legislation built out for nuclear power. They're drafting it. Starting from zero is quite slow.