Comment by mjevans
1 year ago
Not building Gen 4 nuclear plants conveniently close to major cities and industrial centers along the coastline where they can sink the off the coast a bit...
As a major infrastructure component electricity is one of those natural monopolies that should be socialized, with long term planning by the community (government agencies) and built by contractors on fixed price for delivering an output contracts - with a reasonable price and insurance for not building it correctly the first time included.
The cost of generation is a tiny fraction of the cost of the transmission and distribution grid in California.
We hav pricy electricity because of our "fixed" grid costs, not because of expensive generation. Utilities usually take a fixed rate of profit from T&D, and are therefore incentivized to overbuild as much as possible, and it's the regulators' job to stop that.
A socialized grid probably would be run much better than the one by PG&E, however legislation to buy them out has usually been extremely poorly timed so that the state, as purchaser, would take the biggest losses instead of the investors who backed the bad management team.
Transmission would be much less of an issue if source and demand were closer together.