California Income-based electric bills

That's part of supply. It's how the energy is supplied to the customer. Mismanagement of the supply includes both the wild fires caused by not clearing the dry brush, the poor maintenance of the grid, and the shutting down of nuclear plants without building new ones. All of this affects how much energy people are getting and increases prices. If at least we had a good production by building nuclear, the other factors would be alleviated.

Yeah I would support public investment in nuclear. I think it would be good to at least explore the options, build smaller nuclear facilities if possible, learning along the way. Renewables are still great for smaller use cases, and it can continue improving.

I think either way it has to be a collab. between private and public sectors because of the magnitude of the risk, which in theory is largely understood but in practice people can make mistakes and those will be costly. Ultimately this would only be done because of climate change, otherwise we could just take our time switching to renewables.

Renewables don't scale and don't have the energy density to satisfy the demand that would require replacing fossil fuels. It's not even close. We don't know when that new battery tech will be ready, it could easily be another decade or more... so the real question is do we want to risk climate change more and more, or should we use nuclear to replace fossil fuels immediately while the renewable tech matures.

Cheap solar is a meme. Zero solar farms can provide their sticker output overnight after an overcast winter day. Most can't provide their sticker output all night after a sunny summer day! Of course, these shortfalls can't result in blackouts, so instead we simply keep extra backup capacity on standby. The studies never price this in, but you can rest assured that the energy companies do.

Nuclear is only expensive because we've spent decades bureaucratically strangling it with red tape.

The technology exists to safely do nuclear at low cost. We just need to remove the billions of dollars wasted in intentionally-bad regulatory processes that were written into law to prevent nuclear from being successful.

It's not fair to compare 1 GW of solar to 1 GW of nuclear power.

A solar plant will produce at full capacity an equivalent of ~5 hours a day.

Nuclear will produce at full capacity for 24/7/365.

Palo Alto and Santa Clara both have "city owned utilities". Those utilities don't produce power, they don't bring power into the cities, they may not even distribute power within the cities.

What they do do is buy power and sell it to the residents.

Thanks to 1930s laws, they get first claim on the least expensive power sources in California.

Both Santa Clara and Palo Alto "power companies" have also managed to minimize the "hey, there's a large pile of money and if we only raise rates just a bit, think of all the good that we could do."

I mention that because San Jose has started a local "utility" that doesn't have appreciably lower rates than PG&E.

The problem in my neighborhood (literally right across the 101 from the Google MTV campus) was that PG&E never bothered to bury the lines, and the overhead lines were poorly maintained and overgrown by trees. So whenever there was wind, branches would drop, and take out the power. We'd have an outtage quite regularly.

Contrast to my neighborhoods in other states where the power wires were buried, and the only times we were without power was when the transmission lines to the entire neighborhood were taken out by weather far more severe than I ever saw in CA.

Density. PG&E needs to cover a lot of more rural land including many fire prone areas which the more local municipal services do not

One of the biggest reasons monopolists are a problem is that they can exploitatively price and charge as much as possible from each customer, minimizing the consumer surplus.

Kind of like the state of California is trying to do here.

Believe it or not, but a whole lot of people don't like price discrimination and aren't in the top 10%.

Nah.

The construction of new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia provides a real-world example to re-evaluate the costs associated with building nuclear power versus a combination of solar power and battery storage.

The Plant Vogtle expansion involved the construction of two new reactors, Units 3 and 4, which faced significant delays and cost overruns. Initially estimated to cost around $14 billion with an expected operational start in 2016, the project's expenses ballooned to over $30 billion, more than double the original estimate. This increase does not include an additional $3.68 billion paid by the original contractor, Westinghouse, to the owners after going bankrupt, which brings the total spending to more than $34 billion. The construction started in 2009, with Unit 3 reaching "initial criticality" in 2023, marking the beginning of a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction. Unit 3 is expected to come into service in mid-2023, with Unit 4 following in late 2023 or early 2024 [1](https://www.gpb.org/news/2023/05/25/georgia-nuclear-rebirth-...) [2](https://www.gpb.org/news/2022/05/09/georgia-nuclear-plants-c...) [3](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/georgias-big-ne...).

- Nuclear (Vogtle): The total projected costs for the Vogtle expansion are nearing $35 billion for two reactors, providing a combined capacity of 2.2 GW. This translates to approximately $15.9 billion per GW.

- Solar + Megapack: As previously estimated, the capital cost for solar power is around $1 billion per GW. Adding battery storage to match the continuous output capability of nuclear plants significantly affects the total cost. Tesla Megapack costs vary, but an estimate of around $200 million for 1 GWh of storage was given. The exact cost for solar plus Megapack to achieve comparable 24/7 output capacity as nuclear would depend on the required storage duration to offset the variability of solar generation.

The Vogtle project's cost overruns and delays highlight the financial risks associated with large-scale nuclear projects. The actual cost of Vogtle significantly exceeds initial projections, emphasizing the challenge of managing complex nuclear construction projects within budget and timeline expectations. In contrast, solar and battery storage projects, such as those utilizing Tesla's Megapack, offer faster deployment times and have seen decreasing costs over time. However, to achieve a continuous power supply similar to a 1 GW nuclear plant, substantial investment in storage would be necessary, potentially narrowing the cost difference.

These insights from the Vogtle project's experience underline the importance of considering not only the upfront capital costs but also the risk of cost overruns and delays in large-scale energy projects. While nuclear power offers the advantage of continuous, low-carbon electricity generation, the financial and logistical challenges evident in the Vogtle expansion may prompt utilities and policymakers to favor the more predictable costs and scalability of renewable energy and storage solutions.

For future energy projects, this comparison underscores the necessity of rigorous project management, realistic budgeting, and the consideration of evolving energy technologies and market conditions.