> But amid the debate over rate design, we’ve lost sight of the much bigger challenge of how to bring down utility costs overall
You increase supply!! Build more nuclear!! Then it will be cheap for everyone. But nooo, somehow the cost of nuclear is more than the cost of climate change.
One of the biggest such costs in California is the billions of dollars being spent on hardening and burying power lines to reduce the risk of them sparking wildfires. Utilities are also bearing the costs of compensating the victims of wildfires caused by poorly maintained grid equipment
They could then collect the costs off the energy companies.
The proposed solution seems like a corporation's wet-dream - Being able to charge consumers exactly the maximum amount of what they are able to pay for a product.
The private sector is uninterested in such long term ROI so "building more buclear" would require a major expansion of public investment. Would you support that? If so, the next question is whether that investment is delivered to the private sector as a subsidy or whether the infrastructure will be built and maintained publicly, because the former has a terrible track record while the latter has shown great historical success (France, Germany, and even the US) but is not in the imaginations of the current ruling class. What do you prefer?
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.
Nuclear makes no financial sense in CA.
https://www.caiso.com/market/Pages/ReportsBulletins/Renewabl...
Nuclear plants have been powering France for 50 years, of course it is viable!
[0] https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/us/cal...
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.
There will still be 39,000,000+ people left in the state if you do.
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: 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.
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.
it's not the cost of solar you've got to look at, but the cost of solar + batteries to cover the problem with solar: it doesn't work when the sun isn't shining. Now, that's less of a problem for most of California (it's an issue in snowy Tahoe), and grid-sized energy storage can cover the shortfall, but nuclear fission simply doesn't have that problem. It has other problems instead, which make solar the better choice for California, imo, but not everywhere is LA.