Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
This isnt for a lack of investment either.
Gas is also waaaay cheaper than equivalent amounts of nuclear power - like 3x cheaper.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
For example a short event in US with duration 2 hours–4 days, depending on location, affecting 55 million people.
Deaths: Almost 100
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
The Economic Impacts of the August 2003 Blackout
"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1113/ml111300584.pdf
Short blackout: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout
"The employers' organization CEOE estimated that the outage resulted in economic losses valued at €1.6 billion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.
(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).
Well what are we doing if the straight of hormuz isn't hormuzing?
Demand will adapt via price signals. Same story as in every market.
This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.