The cost of storage must be factored into the cost of renewables, else it's not really a fair comparison. How much does it cost to build out 10 hours of storage @ 50% of day time generation wattage?
Utility scale wind = $26-$50/MWh + wholesale 100MWh storage ($55-$97) = $81-$147
Coal = $65-$152/MWh
Nuclear: $131-$204/MWh
These don't include pump-hydro which is a widely used and very cheap storage mechanism.
It's much cheaper and better to overbuild renewables and put a few cheap gas peaker plants around as backup.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
But this is besides the point. Energy companies spent money on long range power cables because they calculate they can make a profit on the transmitted energy. Nuclear power stations spend taxpayer billions because they can't possibly compete commercially. That's the key difference.
Lazard uses the worst possible nuclear builds and ignores the good ones. They ignore China, Korea, Japanese, and Russian builds. In 2006 Japan was churning out ultra-modern ABWR reactors in 36 months (not the old Fukushima kind). Unbelievably cheap and effective. Today, China's Hualong One builds are fully serialized. Yet Lazard keeps on looking at the worst 2 nuclear builds in history and ignoring e.g. the necessary cost of new transmission and overbuilding in order to actually decarbonize at scale with wind solar and gigatonnes of batteries.
Lazard numbers are a farce. Please ignore.
This is why you have a blend of solar, wind and HVEC transmission lines across windzones!
Rolling blackouts (which is the kind of thing that batteries prevent) average less than 2 hours across the US and Europe, so 4 hours is great.
Did you know that the measured availability rates for non-renewable technologies is as follows:
> Historical estimates of 1−EFORd for competing technologies are 89.7%, 92.0%, and 97.3% for natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants, respectively.[1]
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9#se...