You can't even fuel a nuke for the lifecycle cost of PV at the anticipated 2020 installed price, let alone build it. (It's gone from too cheap to meter to to expensive to matter.) Nukes don't ramp either- they are base-load only generators, and require a huge amount of cooling water resource. The financial case is too hard to make in the US, which has many other options, and is currently facing flat to falling demand for electricity.
At the current per MMBTU cost of coal & natural gas, a best-in-class ~40% efficiency combined cycle coal gasification generator is roughly the same per kwh operating cost of ~50% efficiency combined cycle gas plant, but more expensive to build and less flexible. It can't ramp up or down nearly as effectively as combined cycle gas. Even though they ramp faster than nukes, they're really a base-load only solution. But they're still far more expensive than the anticipated year 2025 cost of both wind & PV power, and thus financially more risky to build than combined cycle gas, which is itself a risky long term investment, but flexible enough to load-track.
In the ERCOT grid (Texas) overall demand for electricity is growing, unlike the rest of the US, but growth in cheaper & more flexible wind power is undercutting even the existing baseload generators, not just peakers. They have better wind sources in Texas than New England, but also cheaper power overall. In TX they can count on a ~35% capacity factor out of a wind farm, whereas in the better wind spots in VT and the coastal areas 25-30% is about all you get- but offshore it can match TX grade wind capacity factors (at a higher installed & lifecycle cost). Offshore wind power in the NE has a comparable lifecycle cost to new nukes, but can be built faster. Whether that actually happens in NJ remains to be seen- the financial case for it is about as clear for the financial case for nukes- iffy at best. The financial case for PV at @ $2/watt is a slam dunk. Cheap wind is breaking the paradigm in Texas, and now that the transmission lines have been upgraded, has the potential of putting existing fossil-plants out of business.
New records for output are being broken every few months, and the build-out is continuing apace. But PV is also being sold at below coal-fired pricing on a 20 year power purchase agreements in Texas, and
PV will probably eclipse wind for new production there before 2020, provided the regulatory environment doesn't move in to protect the incumbent generators.
The power biz is changing pretty fast- faster than you can build a nuke or a new combine cycle coal gasification plant, and it doesn't take EPA action to make that happen. The recent EPA action is barely more than a greenwashing, taking credit for most of what has already happened (and will happen) due to other economic forces, as long as incumbent generators aren't unduly shielded from competition through lobbying their regulators. Cheap gas and cheap wind (and soon, cheap PV) are what is killing coal, not the EPA. As much as the administration would like to take credit for it, it's the Danish/German/US wind power innovators and gas production innovators that did the job for them. But by claiming that policy "victory" it gives the US a club on which to beat others up with regarding carbon emissions. India is pretty much hitting it's coal power production limits due to lack of available cooling water- I suppose the newly elected prime minister Modi will now claim that victory too, and sign on to reductions, since they pretty much
have to in order to have enough potable & agricultural water. China is having to scale back coal for both water resource and breathable air issues, and oh yeah, they've noticed that wind & PV are cheaper than coal for them too, and don't create import cost/supply issues. Then the US administration (whomever is in office when that happens) will crow about how they fixed the problem by browbeating India & China with the EPA/other policies. It's political theater more than it is policy, even though it's an entertaining show, eh? ;-) The bottom line is still financial, and it's rapidly tilting in favor of renewables, independently of the carbon emissions issue.
On heating colonials & capes with mini-splits:
There are many existence proofs of colonials & capes in my neighborhood (central MA, design temps between 0F & +5F) where a single mini-split can cut oil consumption by more than half, and 2 mini-splits can cut oil (or resistance electricity) consumption by more than 2/3. The NEEA Northwest Ductless program was solely for homes heated with resistance electricity, and the reduction in heating power use on the many dozens of homes field-monitored was about half, almost all with just a single mini-split, across a range of home styles and climate zones from climate zone 4C to zone 6B- the latter of which is comparable to all but the coldest parts of New England.
The NEEA doesn't have a thumb on the scale- they are a consortium of electric utility stake holders who need accuracy on how much power use (particularly peak load power) they can anticipate by installing mini-splits in homes heated with resistance electricity. The net result has been to heavily subsidize the first mini-split in most of their service areas, since it's cheaper to buy that capacity with the resulting efficiency than it is to build new generating capacity (any type) or upgrade substation & distribution infrastructure. A single mini-split cuts the total heating power consumption in half, even if it only cuts the peak power loads in those homes by about a quarter. (They and their regulators have determined that it's in the best interest of other ratepayers to subsidize that, at least for the first mini-split, and in some service territories more.)
An electric furnace or boiler in NJ is only 20% more expensive to operate than $4 oil, and is at-parity with $5 oil. It's not rocket science, it's napkin-math. Without the heat pump and JUST the electric boiler it's 20% more expensive (for now), but with the mini-split it's 20% cheaper. (The NEEA has tons of data available online, if you're looking for verification- and that's with 5-6 year old ductless technology- the newer versions are more than 10% more efficient. ) In MA where power is more expensive than NJ the electric boiler + single mini-split solution would be at parity with $4 oil.
NJ is mostly in zone 4A, the colder parts are in zone 5A, so performance will be comparable or better than the NEEA average. Assuming it tracks the NEEA experience an electric boiler supplying half the BTUs with 14 cent elecricity at 1.2x the cost of 85%/$4 oil, with the other half is from a mini-split averaging a COP of 3.0 (though 3.5 is more realistic), at less than 0.4 x the cost of 85% oil, the net cost is going to come in around (1.2 x 0.5) + (0.4 x 0.5)= 0.8x the cost of heating with oil. That's a 20% savings at current market rates.
Without the heat pump and JUST the electric boiler it's 20% more expensive (for now), but with the addition of mini-split it's 20% cheaper. With 2 mini-splits it would be quite a bit cheaper, if the layout of the house made that workable.
Betting on new oil heating boiler is betting that over the next 20 years depletion rates of the easy oil fields won't steepen (in the face of hard evidence that suggests otherwise), and that growth in world demand for oil as a transportation fuel will remain at it's fairly tepid recent-year's rates (plausible at the margins, if not compelling), and that PV & wind won't out-compete all other grid sources on price by 2025. When the likes of Barclays, Sanford Bernstein, and CitiGroup (investment bankers are not exactly green-tech cheerleaders, they're in it for the green-cash) are all taking the other side of that grid-source bet, how firm can your confidence be that they are all wrong?
And what makes you think that it isn't as likely that #2 oil won't average $5 or higher over the next 20 years, as more and more Indian & Chinese drivers are hitting the road? Demand can ramp a lot faster than production, since almost all new production is from tight sources, which require an order of magnitude more drilling. Liquids have a lot more value as transportation fuels, an application with fewer alternatives, and will support a higher price than as space heating fuels. Electricity sources have many competitors, and don't require liquid forms or high energy density to be effective. The potential is much more likely for oil pricing to trend higher than it is to fall, and it can really only fall about 25% before a large fraction of the new- sources have to dry up.