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.
There’s some hidden assumptions in there that aren’t quite warrented.
First, when quoting output, solar tend to state their peak output at full sunlight. How much they actually put out depends on the area, but reducing the number to 20% is a good rule of thumb.
Second, you seem to be thinking of rooftop residential installs. Those are the most expensive way to do solar. In fact, levelized cost of energy studies show it’s almost as bad as nuclear. Home installs have trouble taking advantage of the economics of mass production. Making a dedicated solar field is far more cost efficient. So much so that nuclear looks pathetic on those same levelized cost studies.
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.
There’s some hidden assumptions in there that aren’t quite warrented.
First, when quoting output, solar tend to state their peak output at full sunlight. How much they actually put out depends on the area, but reducing the number to 20% is a good rule of thumb.
Second, you seem to be thinking of rooftop residential installs. Those are the most expensive way to do solar. In fact, levelized cost of energy studies show it’s almost as bad as nuclear. Home installs have trouble taking advantage of the economics of mass production. Making a dedicated solar field is far more cost efficient. So much so that nuclear looks pathetic on those same levelized cost studies.
The project started 10 years ago. Renewables were about to burst open and hit some incredible cost reductions.
This project looked good at the time.