Right now. Seriously, companies that are building gas/coal/nuclear plants under the assumption that electricity prices are going to stay at the current levels are making a very fatal mistake. A lot of investments in this space are drying up for this reason or effectively under water. Investors know this and are moving their money elsewhere.

Cost per mwh from off-shore wind is below 50$ now in a market where the prices peaking north of 500$ recently. Very profitable business. Solar energy is cheaper than that and even more profitable. Basically as panel prices drop, the life time cost of their energy drops as well. And since that is measured in decades, it's very low to begin with.

A 100 watt panel operational for 3 decades producing maybe 0.5kwh per day on average would produce around 5 mwh of power during it's operational life (a bit over 10k days, easy number to work with). More in sunny places, less in cloudy places. You can get solar panels like that at around 50$. Those are consumer prices, power plants would be able get better deals. The higher efficiency ones that people actually put on their roofs are more expensive of course but also produce more energy. The cost of the energy they produce is probably around 30-40$ per mwh That's domestic solar and right now. Prices for commercial solar plants are around 1-2 cents per kwh in some sunny countries (unsubsidized). So 10-20$ per mwh In other places it's a bit higher. We'll see that drop below 10$ very soon. Offshore wind is more expensive typically but still very lucrative.

So, in a market where that is true right now, planning to operate new plants where the energy cost is at least 10x that, you are not going to be able to compete long term. Basically operating at 10x the cost of your competitors is a lousy business plan. And when 10x has a chance of becoming 100x or even a 1000x it's basically madness to even consider that.

Prices will eventually actually drop below a 10 cents per mwh. It's a bold prediction but you can just look at the cost curves and trends and make some predictions. It will happen in the next 2-3 decades. That's a 10x improvement relative to now.

What makes solar panels expensive is all the exotic materials, glass, and energy needed to produce them. Energy cost is trending down. So, that helps. And there are companies producing solar with organic materials that are essentially printing them on rolls. This is a new and emerging business but you'd find those on some EV car roofs for example. That sounds like something that could drop prices a lot and would also be really scalable. Lower material cost, lower energy cost, economies of scale. A 10x cost drop is a conservative estimate. It might turn int 50x or even 100x eventually. So, relative to the 10x difference we have today that adds up to a very depressing outlook for anything else.

So, coal/nuclear/gas power plant creation is not a great investment currently. These plants need to operate for decades to generate meaningful return on investment.

Short term there's plenty of demand for expensive energy, long term energy is going to be so cheap and plentiful that that business will dry up rapidly. More so than is already happening.

Many power plants are of course already unsustainable economically and only survive because of government support and protectionist measures. There are a lot of coal companies that went bankrupt in recent years. And gas plants aren't doing much better. Nuclear plants have similar issues. Yes they are clean but way too expensive. People are building new ones not because they are cheap but because securing access to energy is strategically important to countries. But unless somebody figures out how to make them 100x cheaper than they are now, they are not going to ever be competitive. And there's no guarantee that 100x would be enough even.