Problem with the "would be cheap for half the year" is that you would still have the capital costs of building the grid for 2x (actually you would need 4x the g

Problem with the "would be cheap for half the year" is that you would still have the capital costs of building the grid for 2x (actually you would need 4x the grid as the energy usage during winter is roughly 2x of the amount in summer in Finland) the use as you want to run your factory during the winter too. Even if solar is cheap I doubt it is that cheap to offset a capital cost like that. Most of central Europe is a quite useless comparison for a place like Finland for energy production. The weather is just very different. ~2 hours of sunlight and -30 weather isn't that rare even in Helsinki (which is quite a bit father south then a good chunk of the country). Pretty much whole of Finland is outside of the "makes sense to build solar here" zone. I don't see that many people building big solar plants in Alaska so why would you in Finland (roughly the same latitude) Australia has mostly been digging coal for export. It is quite natural that they would close mines if the demand internationally (mainly in Asia) goes down.