The REPOWER Plan
Repowering the American electric grid
Figure 1. Deterioration in American Grid Performance
A White Paper called The REPOWER Plan: Repowering the American Electric Grid has been uploaded to the Flop book site. It is a slightly more detailed description of the Gordian Knot Group's plan for resurrecting the American grid, making it far more reliable and resilient, reducing grid CO2 emissions by a factor of twenty, and making electricity as cheap as it has ever been, cheap enough to push into non-grid markets.
The REPOWER plan is based on
1. Replacing all subsidies and mandates with a CO2 fee, provisionally set at $100 per ton CO2.
2. A grid of ratepayer owned coops which provide local power distribution and backup power.
3. Coops or consortia of coops contracting with merchant providers for the bulk of their power, or possibly building their own base load plants.
4. Replacing a nuclear regulatory system which is based on and depends on the Two Lies with Underwriter Certification.
Nuclear's remarkable energy density, combined with competition will drive the wholesale cost of nuclear down to its should-cost of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The end result will be a largely nuclear grid, backed up by local fossil generation and supplemented in some areas by hydro, wind or solar. The REPOWER grid will be low cost, low CO2, reliable, and resilient.
Just read your entire plan. I find your proposal for overhauling nuclear regulation quite interesting. I am a bit skeptical that we can get nuclear down to 3 cents/kWh, but I would be happy if it happens.
In the short-term, I think natural gas is far cheaper and faster to build than nuclear in North America, nuclear might be better in the long term, particularly if it actually gets that cheap. But my guess is that would take at least a decade.
Here is my plan:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-simple-and-cost-effective-plan
I am not a big fan of a carbon tax for many reasons:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-a-carbon-tax-will-not-work
Getting rid of that would dramatically reduce the costs of your plan.
Jack, I will have to read the other two works cited here but provisionally this looks like a solid suggestion. I also suggested a similar approach of eliminating subsidies and imposing a carbon tax.
Human material progress, all of the advancement that made life possible, require energy.
Energy is what powers civilizations, our collective social supercomputer. There is so much we can do with energy abundance.