And there are other problems that I rarely hear people mention when they do the comparison.
So wind and solar are intermittent so you have to factor the cost of a stand by power supply (which you need to pay for whether you use it or not), or power storage (which we can't do at scale).
You also rarely hit peak capacity with wind (unless you have a reliably strong and steady wind) so you need to over provision by a larger ratio. Nuclear is about 70% utilisation on average, wind about 20%. Similar story with solar.
Nuclear plants tent to have a very long shelf life, wind not so much (to take into account in the cost comparison)
There is a lot of diversification in the demand, not all machines of a country are switched on at the same time, in fact a small fraction of the machines are consuming electricity at a given time. When you adopt a centralised grid with large sources of power, you benefit from this diversification. When you produce the electricity locally, you need to size it for the max local demand, and you need to do that everywhere. That means you end up installing a lot more capacity than you would need with a centralised network.
And the grid in most developped countries is already designed for a centralised supply, so if you switch to a completely different approach you need to invest in your grid.
It's not enough to compare the cost per W produced.
So wind and solar are intermittent so you have to factor the cost of a stand by power supply (which you need to pay for whether you use it or not), or power storage (which we can't do at scale).
You also rarely hit peak capacity with wind (unless you have a reliably strong and steady wind) so you need to over provision by a larger ratio. Nuclear is about 70% utilisation on average, wind about 20%. Similar story with solar.
Nuclear plants tent to have a very long shelf life, wind not so much (to take into account in the cost comparison)
There is a lot of diversification in the demand, not all machines of a country are switched on at the same time, in fact a small fraction of the machines are consuming electricity at a given time. When you adopt a centralised grid with large sources of power, you benefit from this diversification. When you produce the electricity locally, you need to size it for the max local demand, and you need to do that everywhere. That means you end up installing a lot more capacity than you would need with a centralised network.
And the grid in most developped countries is already designed for a centralised supply, so if you switch to a completely different approach you need to invest in your grid.
It's not enough to compare the cost per W produced.