firstly, as you scale up wind to a bigger proportion of the grid, the quality of your sites degrades quickly
So what? That's an argument against trying for 100 % wind, which is a crude straw man that nobody is defending.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You propose a 0/0/80/20 mix.
I tell you that this is unlikely to be economical, and is susceptible to all the normal risks of monocropping vis-a-vis systemic failures.
A 80/0/0/20 mix is equally unlikely to be economical, but that is irrelevant, because no sane person proposes this mix. Personally, I could see a 45/25/10/20 mix, if solar matures rapidly, or a 45/10/25/20 mix if it does not. Give or take ten to twenty percentage points.
Alternatively, one can consider the marginal cost of adding capacity. Since nuclear has already harvested all the economies of scale that are likely to apply, you are facing constant or increasing marginal cost as you add nuclear to the energy mix. Wind has harvested much but not all of its economies of scale, so for a while you're going to see declining marginal cost before they start going up again.
Now, in any scenario where you have two or more factors of production that all have constant or rising marginal cost, it makes sense to diversify. This is really, really simple arithmetic...
There is an issue around nuclear power: some people see it in terms of cost benefit analysis and some simply believe that the risks are such as to exclude it - they effectively belief the costs are unbounded. You can't solve that by talking about cost.
