Charge time & cost calculator spreadsheet

[DerMot]

Solar/wind etc are cheaper once up an running, but there are upfront costs that have to be paid.

From looking at the history of it, it seems that if it weren't for fed. gov. subsidies and incentives, fueled by a need for enriched material for nuclear weapons programs, a civilian nuclear power industry would not have existed at all in the US.

Boiling water with a deadly material that has a half life in the thousands of years and produces 'waste' that is highly corrosive of everything seems like a really bad idea to me...as does having the ability to destroy civilization with nuclear weapons. To err is human, to really screw up you need a nuclear power plant?

Seems like CA has grid maintenance issues by the private utilities that own them from news reports that have caused some of the fires complicating the issues. The liability costs to the utilities found to have been responsible for the fires must be enormous.

One way or another all the costs for the grid, including negligence costs, get passed on to the consumer

If a privately owned utility through rates and surcharges, if public through taxes.

The differences include that publicly traded private companies have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders and have a management structure that gets paid based on profits on a yearly basis, although rates may be regulated by the elected government or appointed officials.

Public utilities are funded by tax payers from the general revenue, and tax rates are often subject to the political whims of the populace - almost nobody thinks THEY should be paying taxes, lol.

There are pros and cons to private vs publicly owned utilities, I don't know which is better in the long run.
Plenty of examples of failures in both cases.

Will it be better when AI runs everything including the grid?

Somehow I doubt it...and dread it.

Provinces: British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, and New Brunswick rely on Crown corporations (such as BC Hydro or Hydro-Québec) to supply and deliver nearly all of their electricity.

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[K6CCC]

Provinces: British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, and New Brunswick rely on Crown corporations (such as BC Hydro or Hydro-Québec) to supply and deliver nearly all of their electricity.

Consider your area lucky - you have the water to do it. Many of the rest of us don't have that option.