How much fossil fuel are acceptable to burn, should subsidizes count to the total cost, should grid connections and transport count to the total cost, and what is the time frame? Is the market allowed to freely spike based on supply and demand with no price roof?
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
A lot of this depends on the scale - and cost (two way relationship) of domestic battery rollout.
An individual uses (broad rule of thumb average) somewhere in the 300-500W range to participate in society at a modern level. A warm and well-lit home, cooking a couple of meals, hot water, an EV with enough charge to get to work, TV, laptop and so on. This is before we consider industry and infrastructure.
It's possible to bring those numbers down a bit, but not a lot. Even with fairly aggressive optimisations (Passivhaus, ebike, low-energy cooking), below 100W it gets tough.
But on the flip side, this means a 50kWh home battery can keep a family home running for a day, and 100-200kWh longer than that. 100kWh is affordable today as a home upgrade, and if people adopted a little more of a flexibility ethic with respect to availability, 200kWh will comfortably run a four-person home for a week.
Granted 200kWh domestic instals aren't affordable yet, but by the time these NPPs are online - five years? - they likely will be.
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.