Comment by epistasis

Comment by epistasis 9 hours ago

Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives.

Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors.

Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.

TheCraiggers 8 hours ago

> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.

But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.

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epistasis 6 hours ago

Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.

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- idiotsecant 5 hours ago
  
  A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
  
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  epistasis 5 hours ago
  
  > New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission.
  That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.
  And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
  
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fuzzfactor 8 hours ago

>Unlocking Up to 6.6 GW

You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment.

What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates?

To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else.

Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.

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halJordan 8 hours ago

I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"

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