> 3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.

Show me your Monte Carlo simulation where wind (which is negatively correlated to solar) and 8 hours of battery storage are factored in, along with small amounts of gas peaking plants.

You don't even need to open up R or Pandas to understand that solar is not viable in the winter.

Here's the official meteorology insitutions sunshine data: https://www.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/1991-2020-auringonpaiste-ja...

Here's some solar production data over the seasons in visual form: https://profilesolar.com/locations/Finland/Helsinki/

What is also important to know is during the winter is that while production on average shows numbers every day, in practice that production comes only during the few actually sunny days in December when the panels aren't covered in snow.

Go even a bit up north from Helsinki and unless you keep your panels clear of snow manually, you'll hardly make anything between Nov and April.

EDIT: Here's a reddit thread where someone shares real production data: https://old.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/1i6onkk/solar_ener...

In case people want to play with a toy model: https://model.energy/

We have the problem of stable high-pressure polar air masses potentially parking over the country. Whenever that happens, we get 2 weeks of dead calm, coinciding with the coldest weather that occurs in the country. At the time of the year when there is no solar.