[epistasis]

Please no! Our electricity rates are already too high. The massive cost for short-term extensions to Diablo Canyon will drive them even higher.

Think of how much an extension to the lifespan might cost in your head. Now go and look: $8.4B to $11B to keep it running only until 2030.

There is massive political support for nuclear right now, which is the only reason it's being considered. The whole reason it was initially decided not to extend the license was that the cost would be too high. Now people that know nothing about electricity costs, but really love nuclear, have pre-determined that Diablo Canyon should be kept running without regard to better ways to spend that money on our electricity grid.

[belorn]

This is a perfect example where simulations would be really great to demonstrate the cost of replacing the nuclear power station with an alternative. Take last 5 years worth of weather data and energy consumption, run a combination of solar and lithium storage solution for a similar cost as what is being suggested (say $8B), and see if they would fill in the role of the nuclear power plant. If they can't, add one or several natural gas peak plants to the mix and use less storage, and find how much would be needed. Some cost would be added to build new transmission, but it can be added on top of the simulation.

Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.

[epistasis]

> Replacing base load with solar and batteries, especially for days when weather makes supply the lowest and demand the highest, is in general a non-trivial problem, but it is location dependent. Maybe California is one where it make sense.

Storage and gas capacity make this a fairly trivial problem, but it is somewhat location dependent.

The difficulties in deploying it are mostly political and regulatory, and not technical.

Places like Texas, with a fairly open market that allow new entrants to add assets on their own initiative, storage paired with wind and solar is dominating the market. In fact in most of the us, storage/solar/wind is mostly what's getting deployed no the grid, see the map at the bottom:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#

However, you only see batteries getting added after there's already a fairly large chunk of renewables on the grid. Before then, there's not much need for the expense. Last stat I heard was that 60% of solar deployments in the US included storage, and that's only going to go up.

And you can see on EIA's map that the Intermountain gas plant under discussion is the largest gas addition this year. The only reason it's gas and not solar and storage is that in 2019 the union was anti-renewables for political reasons:

https://archive.is/dpoM1

It would have been better to have solar plus storage. There's far more gas on the grid than is necessary to provide backup to California's current solar+storage capacity.

[belorn]

The point of doing simulations is that you will want to avoid to repeat that which happen in EU. During the worst month of the energy crisis, the price started circulating around 10x of the average month, or phrase it in a different way, a single month costed about the same as a usual whole year. Market prices can easily spike when demand start to exceed supply, even if it only occur for a few weeks.

Having a massive fleet of gas plants available do help with keeping the prices down, but it has it own problems. They need to be built, maintained and staffed, which is independent on how much energy they sell. Where I come that means government subsidizes, paid through taxes and grid fees. Those fees can quickly become bigger than the actually consumption cost for some households. Natural gas power plants also natural gas which contribute to global warming, and unless they use expensive filtering, they also contribute to pollution. When you see the pitch black smoke being released, you know they are burning up the build up of contaminants and imperfectly burned fuel, releasing it into the environment.

[dalyons]

California hit a new low of 22% fossil generation for the first half of 25. It makes sense and is already happening

[cameldrv]

By my math that's about 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That's pretty good for California.

[epistasis]

That's horrible for California, whose generation wholesale electricity prices are about 40% of that, at $0.04/kWh. Nuclear sells on to grid at that wholesale price. If the nuclear operator is forced to run at 90% capacity factor, which it will be, somebody is going to be paying PG&E that difference between wholesale cost and the very high price of nuclear energy. That person will be taxpayers, subsidizing PG&Eu, to run an uneconomic nuclear power plant.

See, for example, Figure E. 1 on page 9 of this PDF report which compares the wholesale prices by month of CAISO to other neighboring system operators:

https://www.caiso.com/documents/2025-first-quarter-report-on...

With the addition of storage to the grid in CAISO, costs are staying super low.

California's high electricity costs are from the grid, not from electricity generation, which as you can see meets or beats our peers. Solar and storage are super cheap. If we invest in nuclear we will be adding high generation cost to our woes.