You have government guided utilities and fake markets with fake pricing plus lots of intensives.
There are externalizes all over the place and there is strange mix between public and private that is hard to understand. Solar still gets incentives when they produce energy at negative prices for example. Fossil fuel has a huge negative externalize, and while I believe free market often produces good solutions for externalizes, it doesn't work on a global scale.
So you have issues on the traditional prices, you have the subsidies renewables that are pushed by mandates (ie you have to deploy 30% renewables) and in addition to that, renewable just use the grid as storage and let the grid provider worry about the problem and you have nuclear that is essentially blocked from developing.
Dispatch-able power is vastly under-priced in most markets.
Markets work if price intensifies carry real information, and in electricity markets have to many structural problems.
What should be done is what NASA did for space station supply. Select 5-10 competitors for next generation nuclear let them develop different concepts and go threw a multi round process where the company and the regulator learn, you end up building 3 and then promise at that you are gone order min. 3 more reactors from two of them. That would actually get nuclear in the market in a real way.
The crazy thing is that the government actually HAS the money to run this competition. Nuclear reactor providers have paying into an account for a long, long time. There are billions and billions available but its just a political issue that its not happening.
For better or for worse, energy is something government has been deeply and fundamentally involved with, 'the market' will not converge on the right solution in this situation.
You have government guided utilities and fake markets with fake pricing plus lots of intensives.
There are externalizes all over the place and there is strange mix between public and private that is hard to understand. Solar still gets incentives when they produce energy at negative prices for example. Fossil fuel has a huge negative externalize, and while I believe free market often produces good solutions for externalizes, it doesn't work on a global scale.
So you have issues on the traditional prices, you have the subsidies renewables that are pushed by mandates (ie you have to deploy 30% renewables) and in addition to that, renewable just use the grid as storage and let the grid provider worry about the problem and you have nuclear that is essentially blocked from developing.
Dispatch-able power is vastly under-priced in most markets.
Markets work if price intensifies carry real information, and in electricity markets have to many structural problems.
What should be done is what NASA did for space station supply. Select 5-10 competitors for next generation nuclear let them develop different concepts and go threw a multi round process where the company and the regulator learn, you end up building 3 and then promise at that you are gone order min. 3 more reactors from two of them. That would actually get nuclear in the market in a real way.
The crazy thing is that the government actually HAS the money to run this competition. Nuclear reactor providers have paying into an account for a long, long time. There are billions and billions available but its just a political issue that its not happening.
For better or for worse, energy is something government has been deeply and fundamentally involved with, 'the market' will not converge on the right solution in this situation.