The whole project has been a huge unjust wealth transfer directly from ratepayers to shareholders, and the regulatory-captured Georgia Public Service Commission just let it happen.
(If I sound bitter, it’s because I’m one of the ratepayers getting screwed.)
Shitty as that is, at least you’re getting a reactor out of it all. I still support renewables over nuclear, primarily for cost-benefit reasons, but it’s always good to have some diversity in the generation mix.
We already had nuclear. This project was building reactors #3 and #4 on a site that already had two, and between that and Plant Hatch, nuclear was apparently already 23% of GA Power’s energy mix even before these new ones came online.
Frankly, renewables would’ve been superior for energy mix diversity reasons, too. The fact that it would’ve also just been flat-out cheaper for Georgia Power to pay to install solar on my (and everybody else’s) house just adds insult to injury.
(Okay, that last bit might be hyperbole – I haven’t done the math. But still…!)
Solar + battery would work for people who have houses but not industry or mid-high rises. The transmission grid doesn’t just function as a means to get energy places but it connects everything in to one system as a means to stabilize everything. So when that electric arc furnace is turned on there isn’t a brownout because the huge demand has been scheduled and generation can be dispatched accordingly. At the distribution grid which is the lower voltage lines connecting homes you can be a lot more creative with microgrid and feed-in-tariffs, in a lot of places these distribution lines are managed by local distribution companies/LDCs which operate separate from the Independent System Operator/ISO which operates the transmission grid and an energy market if there is one.
More than one person lives in a building generally. It’s more like $15,000 to install 1kW of solar, so like $15B to install 1000MW, so you literally could have just about installed the solar capacity with just the cost overrun.
Cost-plus contracts are a Hell of a drug.
The whole project has been a huge unjust wealth transfer directly from ratepayers to shareholders, and the regulatory-captured Georgia Public Service Commission just let it happen.
(If I sound bitter, it’s because I’m one of the ratepayers getting screwed.)
Shitty as that is, at least you’re getting a reactor out of it all. I still support renewables over nuclear, primarily for cost-benefit reasons, but it’s always good to have some diversity in the generation mix.
The big demand right now is a replacement for the capabilities of fossil fuels. There’s a lot going on with energy storage tech right now.
We already had nuclear. This project was building reactors #3 and #4 on a site that already had two, and between that and Plant Hatch, nuclear was apparently already 23% of GA Power’s energy mix even before these new ones came online.
Frankly, renewables would’ve been superior for energy mix diversity reasons, too. The fact that it would’ve also just been flat-out cheaper for Georgia Power to pay to install solar on my (and everybody else’s) house just adds insult to injury.
(Okay, that last bit might be hyperbole – I haven’t done the math. But still…!)
Solar + battery would work for people who have houses but not industry or mid-high rises. The transmission grid doesn’t just function as a means to get energy places but it connects everything in to one system as a means to stabilize everything. So when that electric arc furnace is turned on there isn’t a brownout because the huge demand has been scheduled and generation can be dispatched accordingly. At the distribution grid which is the lower voltage lines connecting homes you can be a lot more creative with microgrid and feed-in-tariffs, in a lot of places these distribution lines are managed by local distribution companies/LDCs which operate separate from the Independent System Operator/ISO which operates the transmission grid and an energy market if there is one.
10 million people. $15k per solar installation. Eh, not too far off.
More than one person lives in a building generally. It’s more like $15,000 to install 1kW of solar, so like $15B to install 1000MW, so you literally could have just about installed the solar capacity with just the cost overrun.