"The plant, which has a projected lifetime of sixty years, has an estimated construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion. The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, which "will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts"."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
Big Oil told us there was nothing to worry about and produced oil, anti-nuclear greens made sure there was no viable alternative for fossil fuels for decades.
Thankfully, we are now developing the solar power and battery tech that can provide an alternative, but we lost several decades.
Also just betting on one technology doesn’t make too much sense, especially considering that uranium is currently not mined in Germany (hasn’t been since the wall came down because it is not economically viable). So Germany would become dependent on other suppliers.
(I am not against nuclear per se, just wanted to provide some thoughts to the counterfactual)
Since natural gas has the currently lowest operational cost of all other fossil fuels on the average, they are usually able to outbid other fossil fuels. However as with any other market, the one that can produce a product cheapest is not always the one that gives the lowest bid and thus different fossil fueled plants get used at different times. Some plants can also produce heat as well as energy and thus artificially lower their bid. Over time however the one who can more cheaply produce a good of the same quality and reliability tend to make more costly production extinct.
It's been examined here :
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/califor...
Quotes of notes:
In 2017, Germany generated 37 percent of its electricity from non-carbon sources.[1] In pursuing the Energiewende, Germany will have invested $580 billion in renewable energy and storage by 2025.
If Germany had invested in nuclear instead, it could have built 46 1.6 GW EPR reactors at the $12.5 billion per reactor cost of the U.K.’s Hinkley Point C. German companies assisted with the design of the EPR and the reactor was explicitly planned to meet the strictest European regulations.
With 46 EPRs operating at 90 percent capacity factor, Germany could first eliminate all coal, gas, and biomass electricity, then make up for today’s 150 terawatt-hours per year of wind and solar from its renewables investment, all while exporting 100 terawatt-hours of electricity to its neighbors (double 2017’s actual exports). Finally, with the remaining 133 terawatt-hours, Germany could decarbonize its entire light vehicle fleet including all 45 million of its passenger vehicles.[2]