Most of what's south of switzerland or north of estonia has decent local weather for it. Finland's resources are quite good compared to even some equatorial places like PNG, just with higher seasonal variability. It's more the central part + UK. The point being that latitude is less important than weather, and as such claiming that solar is untenable in northern US or southern canada because it's merely okay in england is an obvious lie.
All of which is not to say solar won't be more important than gas, coal or nuclear in central europe going forward. Just that wind will take the front seat.
Finland has good weather for solar? You realize how far north they are? They gave good weather for solar in the summer when they don't need electricity for heating anyway. How much solar are they getting right now?
In case you aren't aware latitudes reduce solar energy collected per square meter of land. This can be motivated by tracking solar panels. But what can't be mitigated are shorter days in winter that get more extreme the further your are from the equator. In Helsinki right now the sun rises at 9:30 and sets just after 3pm.
If you lack the critical reasoning ability to understand how that could be useful or to understand that adding a thing that's biased towards summer to a thing that's biased towards winter gives you energy all year around, then we shouldn't really be listening to your energy infrastructure advice.
How many gigawatts of sand storage have been provisioned (in terms of electricity output, not thermal output)? How many years of operational experience do we have? In fact I'm not aware of any project using thermal sand for electric storage, only for district heating. Finland uses about 87TWh electricity annually, working out to about 230 GWh daily. I'd be a lot more convinced of it's viability for seasonal storage if they're able to provision at least a day of storage.
I don't doubt your critical reasoning ability, but I do doubt the wisdom of treating the challenge of provisioning and operating massive seasonal storage on the order of terawatts as a solved problem because of a few district heating projects.
> How many years of operational experience do we have?
Yes. Huge problem. Very nice and good faith objection to something that can be done incredibly simply with a few dollars per kWh. What if some hot water or sand leaks out and contaminates an entire country?
