Looking at the ratio between installed capacity and actual output of wind turbines, this seems like a faulty calculation. 40GW of installed wind capacity will get you a small percentage of 40GW of guaranteed output. Roughly as much as you get from the nuke. The surplus (when there is enough wind) has to be either burned off, compensated, or stored. Storage technology is nowhere near the scale that would be needed. Compensation is done typically using natural gas (see Germany). And burning off is what is done before the gas powerstations kick in.
Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place.
But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.
The ratio of installed capacity and actual output is called load factor.
It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW.
40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
I'm not talking about the average load factor, but the minimum output of the installations. This varies from region to region. At e.g. https://www.smard.de you can easily see the range for wind in Germany. The recent data shows such a minimum at the Oct 12 mark. Anything above that needs to be accounted for. You can also very easily see how gas power stations kick in during lulls. Because that is how it is currently accounted for in Germany (plus the aforementioned burning off of excessive energy to deal with short term spikes etc).
That minimum is, at least for Germany, nowhere near 30% of installed capacity. It's just a few percent. And that's how 40GW are in reality just about one or two GW of guaranteed power. The rest will get burned off or you need a very flexible alternative energy source.
A year ago I would have said that to be gas. Seemed like a good fit for wind. Had Germany converted all its coal and nuclear plants to wind/solar + gas, however, the current situation would be more dire than it already is today.
The most reliable way seems to be to accompany wind with storage. A lot of storage. But that's a long term solution. Short to mid term you need alternative reliable sources. If you don't want to go with coal, nuclear is the only remaining option. So I can't blame the Swedes for going that way.
How is that different from nuclear? Half of France's power plants are offline. That's not reliable at all. Building new nuclear power plants also takes too long.
We're talking about Sweden that has high amounts of hydro power available for storage.
France didn't maintain their nuclear plants during COVID-19 and as a result suffer the consequences now (or rather all of Europe). Furthermore the heat has only made for less than half percent of lost production.
To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.