I feel for you deeply. I’m equally fearful of this for my children, but one small blessing of my kids being very young is at least the ambiguity will probably be over by the time they have to decide. I don’t expect there to be good choices, but at least it will be clear?
California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster
Supply costs have surprisingly not that much to do with Californias silly electric rates. They load into the retail rates all kinds of disaster recovery costs, environmental blah blah costs, distribution upgrades, social programs, the list goes on. Plus straight old fashioned corruption in a state sponsored monopoly.
You can get some idea of the BS that gets loaded in by comparing some rates from municipal grids like SMUD vs pg&e. Same supply, fraction of the end user rate.
Anyway, that is to say theres very little useful to draw on here in comparing nuke to renewable cost.
Given the general dysfunction in American politics (and I say this as an outside observer), the current owners would raise a stink about it, possibly playing the "nationalize == communism == USSR == gulags" card as a negative campaign in the next election.
GA resident here. Let's not close the books on Vogtle yet, as our electricity rates are also moving up quite significantly. Let's get to a steady state before we declare a cost win.
IIRC our rates are up ~30% since 2024, and our electricity prices are 5th highest in the nation. I need to underline that this is in one of the lower-wage states in the country, with few state-level labor protections.
Also: the finances on Vogtle were sufficiently bad that they led to a rapid run-up in consumer electricity rates that generated political fallout. First: two members of the Public Service Commission lost their seats to Democrats, who do not generally win statewide races here. Second: the Federal government has had to specifically loan money to the operator to subsidize consumer rates. The Federal government could equally subsidize California rates down to the average or below if it so desired.
That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July.
The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
For peace of mind I'd like to be able to run my EV (24kwh battery) and spare fridge / freezer off home solar. Anything more than that is gravy, and I'd rather invest in things like Oregon Community Solar.
Electricity is cheap in Georgia because Georgia is generally not a desirable state for business. Electricity, along with a lot of others things, is expensive in California because it's California. There's a lot of talent in California, a lot of inertia, and a huge economy.
> Electricity is cheap in Georgia because Georgia is generally not a desirable state for business.
Are you insulting the great state of Georgia???
Paraphrasing a quote about North Carolina from American Crime Story, season 1, episode 9:
> [...] may I state first of all what a pleasure it is to be [...] once again in the great state of Georgia. My heart gladdens [...] when I stand in one of the original 13 colonies.
I'm not focused on some random attribute. The cost of this specific plant was a big part of this conversation, so I'm asking what number I'm supposed to use for it.
I did not make the claim that Georgia and California are comparable energy markets. The cost of that one subsidy is between 1 and 4 billion. The Federal government's handling of the two states is entirely different and the states themselves have entirely different priorities so the cost of something government manipulates heavily is not about production costs from when projects started and certainly not about production costs if new projects started today.
I mean, who cares? Fire up the gas plants in the one week a year you have weather anomalies. We’d still be 90+% carbon free which would be incredible. The last gap can be solved at a later point as technology evolves
And replacing the natural gas burned in those turbines with hydrogen won't be very expensive, since they will be used so infrequently. Storing energy as hydrogen is much cheaper than storing it in batteries, as measured by cost of storage of capacity.
My friend, renewables only have a capacity factor of .1 (10%). That means those "gas plants" (really coal, and the worst quality coal on the planet too) are running 90% of the time. There is a reason why France's grid makes 7x the power for the same CO2 emissions as Germany.
Wind turbines across a whole region you'd be looking at 30% maybe 35% or even 40% if they're off-shore. Off-shore the winds aren't slowed by all the random structures humans build but also the turbines are much taller and as your elevation increases the reliability of the wind increases.
PV it varies by how far you are from the equator, 10% is realistic for a Northern country like the UK or Germany whereas in Africa you might see 25% or even 30%
Is 5min charge and 500mile range enough to finally stop the usual procession of objections to EVs? I know this is a luxury model and the charging stations will take awhile to roll out, but the trajectory is crystal clear and the momentum fast.
Where’s the usual comments claiming that hybrids are the true way forward?
> Where’s the usual comments claiming that hybrids are the true way forward?
I've never ever seen anyone claim that hybrid is the end goal.
I've only ever seen people say that hybrid is the practical stopgap until faster charging rate/infrastructure and better range is available, probably the result of next-gen batteries.
The link blames the Trump administration, not Musk.
google sez: "The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN's specialized agency for health, aiming to ensure the highest possible level of health for all people. It acts as a global leader, directing health emergencies, promoting healthier lives, expanding universal health coverage, and setting international health standards based on science."
actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is deadly to the economics of nuclear.
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