Comment by tialaramex

But you don't need "a single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant". This is electricity, it's fungible, ten tiny projects produces the same power as one large project.

The UK's biggest solar farm, Cleve Hill has 373 MW nameplate capacity but over the last two years the UK brought 10x that much total subsidised grid solar online - not to mention the unsubsidised which is likely many times more because if you're a gambler the subsidy is mitigating a risk you wanted† I don't have blow-by-blow data for unsubsidised schemes because only the subsidy needs to track that.

† The UK uses Contracts for Difference to subsidise these energy projects. In effect these contracts guarantee you a price, your "strike price" when you sign the contract, plus automatic inflation tracking. But for Solar PV that price can be (and for years now has been) lower than wholesale electricity prices you'd keep outright if you were willing to gamble and risk the wholesale price collapsing. Cleve Hill paid about £3.5M to us because their guaranteed price was lower than the wholesale price they received most of the time.