€50/MWh sounds a lot cheaper than £92.50/MWh (+inflation) that Hinkley Point C will cost in the UK.
Non-drivable energy sources cannot stand on their own. People also want electricity in the evening when there's not enough wind or on a cloudy day.
The fact that the energy produced is not drivable must be factored in the €/MWh otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges.
Also, consumers have to pay (through a tax on the utility bill usually) for periods when renewables produce too much. See negatives prices in Germany [1] or Britain paying windfarms owners more than £1 million a week to shut their production down [2].
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/1132...
An energy that can be "produced" (physically transformed is more accurate) whenever you want and at whatever power you want (with the upper bound of its max power obviously).
In practice there is no such energy: there is always a delay between your choice of delivering a certain amount of power from a hydroelectric dam, a nuclear plant or a coal plant. Some behave better than others in this regard. However with this delay taken into account, you can schedule production according to estimated demand.
With pure renewables without a large storage system this is not possible. Please note that "drivable" energies also need some storage (hydroelectric dam for instance) to help balancing the production/demand. However it is marginal
I cannot wait until storage options work financially and the case for coal, gas and nuclear is a moot point as the costs of renewables are so low.
Construction + 35 years, actually. (expected life 60-80 or more years)
> And then on the hook for the decommissioning costs and storage of the waste.
Not sure how it works in the UK, but in most places nuclear operators are required to pay a certain percentage of operating revenue into a government fund to cover the decommissioning and waste storage costs. Exactly so the taxpayers aren't left with the cleanup bill.
> And are basically paying for much of the development cost, and providing a low interest loan...
What the UK is largely paying for is actually capital costs due to refusing to provide a state guaranteed low interest loan. Had they done that they could have gotten it for half the price. Here's one alternative way to finance similar projects in the UK: http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-mo...
[0] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Weld-repairs-to-d...
[1] http://energywatchgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Nucle... (middle of page)
[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L... (first footnote)
There is a linear dependency between the wind production (and solar production) and the market price: the more intermittent energy is available on the market, the lower the price.