Comment by GloriousKoji

18 hours ago

As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.

  • If we had renewables everywhere, wouldn't a lot of that potentially disappear?

    • It depends how much competition there would be if for-profit company owns them.

      If there is just one source nearby, isn’t that another monopoly risk? The price starts to balance with high distance tranmission cost monopoly vs monopoly of nearby energy source.

      If we find many small renewable sources that are cheap to build, maybe that balances it out.

At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees

  • Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.

The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.