Subsides could make up the difference for nuclear as could vastly increased nighttime prices.
PS: It’s only when your looking at islands like say Hawaii where you want that kind of massive overproduction. Across larger areas you never see 100% production from everywhere at the same time, but you also don’t see minimum production from everywhere at the same time.
They're not the only ones:
> the 732-mile TransWest Express high voltage transmission line filed its first permit application in 2007, but did not receive all of the approvals until 2020. The Environmental Impact Statement alone took eight years to complete.
Local landowners tend to object to these projects. On average, they take over a decade to complete and that includes much shorter lines, which are quicker. Building underground can help with political resistance but multiplies cost by 5X to 10X.
As of 2020, over 750 GW of proposed generation, most of it wind and solar, were waiting for transmission to be built.
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/challenges-decarbon...
China builds transmission a lot faster, and we might be able to speed things up with the SITE Act, which gives the federal government authority to override local and state resistance: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/america-...
But if our solution set can include unpopular new laws to override NIMBYism, then we can make nuclear a lot faster and cheaper, too.
Nuclear also takes 4-6 years to build but can take decades to get permission to start.
So, the main role of interconnect is to deliver power that is cheaper than replenishing your storage locally, or to use replenishing your storage faster than you could with local generation or by ship.
Far-northern climates will need to keep stockpiles of anhydrous ammonia or hydrogen to burn in gas turbine generators when transmission lines fail, probably synthesized using equatorial solar and shipped, or synthesized using transmission-line delivered hydro power. Each place will use the cheapest power available in each moment.
The LCOE for grid storage of power (necessary addition to solar) is $160/MWh.
Double solar with grid storage is as much as $300/MWh at the utility scale using globalized averages reported to NEA, BNEF, Lazard, IRENA 2018-2020. Obviously some countries will be a lot more or less on costs depending on their circumstances and location.
Interconnect isn't enough, all of the US is in darkness for several hours a day. (And Texas will never connect). You require storage, and I still question if 2X is enough to produce enough power during a 10 year minimum without firing up extensive hydrocarbon peaker plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi...
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Your $50MWh also does not include storage LCOE, and not including secondary costs for solar when Nuclear has no secondary costs is considered "a trick" to lie about solar costs.
Include the costs of gigawatts of Elon's lithium ion batteries, and include the cost of having to 2X-4X solar compared to Nuclear to account for variable solar output due to days and seasons, as I said, and your $50MWh becomes around $300MWh
Your also trying to cherry pick numbers the Wikipedia article also lists “$164/MWh” for nuclear. I found the table you got those numbers from which included multiple estimates from 2018 that used data from 2015 and double counting very optimistic nuclear estimates. Frankly utility solar is already being installed at sub 2c/kWh in the US. 68$/MWh would be 6.8c/kWh which shows how far off your umbers are.
Anyway, I would be happy to see the power plant actually run that cheaply but your looking at very optimistic estimates for something that isn’t even online yet and is getting some serious subsides.
Having said that if you’re data is from “Source: IEA/NEA, 2015.” https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2018/7441-full-costs-2018-.... I can understand why you picked those numbers.
So many people talking about energy seem to be stuck in an obsolete past.
A great example is Germany over the past year had uncharacteristically low wind for months and months on end, dropping power generation by as much as 30% for the year from that source.
The result? They burned A LOT of gas and coal. A LOT.
The reality is that power use doesn't necessarily follow the sun or the wind, and so buildouts of those technologies need to be done at extreme multiples of baseline need to account for entire seasons of low output (or just burn hydrocarbons...). You have to build your wind and solar to support a hypothetical 10 or 50 year minimum production, and just overproduce at all times.
This is why baseload nuclear generation will remain a fantastic choice for nations for decades to come, even at a higher price. Nuclear runs at night. It runs when the wind is still. It runs and runs and run no matter what, providing consistent and predictable power. For every MW generated by nuclear, you need about 4 produced by solar/wind, to achieve the same up-time and reliability.
And that's before we discuss the ecological concerns of one tiny little nuclear facility versus dozens of square kilometers of solar/battery builds out to match it.
If our society abandons fission in favor of solar/wind only, it will be to our detriment