How about building housing there? As long as house prices are as high as they are today, that should be the main priority.
(Distribution cost really ought to scale roughly linearly in the length of the system. I don’t know if it does in practice. As a data point, Palo Alto manages to run their entire system for considerably less money than PG&E, and Palo Alto is not an inexpensive place to do anything.)
> It’s possible to sell power to the utility for a reasonable price per MWh. But one can’t easily sell to the utility’s customers.
You might not be able to sell energy directly to them, but you can sell/lease energy generation to them which is essentially the same thing. You won't be able to charge the line rental that makes up the majority of the retail cost post installation of solar, but you can start with some fraction of the difference between they save with the solar system, which is probably at a better price point than wholesale cost of electricity.
Sadly, sun is not universally abundant.
For southern scandinavia it is already connected through HVDC to Central Europe and more are being built.
The only sad thing is that we can't utlize the battery when we lose netpower. Huawei has an addition, but it only gives an outlet on the battery. I wanted inline, like my ups.
IIUC, 18,000 TEU ships have engines that generate ~60 mW - and use about 66,000 gallons of diesel per day.
That's ~$90M in fuel per year, which could be replaced by ~12 of there reactors.
That's $7.5M per year. If these can be purchased for less than $20M - with an 8-year life-span and $2M for fuel and operation per year - then maybe it could work??
60 MW output from a combustion engine means rougly 3x the mechanical energy output for the same amount of Joules input with an electric engine.
These reactors are supposed to be a max of 4 containers in size.
So ~12 of them would be ~48 containers = 4x6x2 = ~80 ft x ~60 ft x ~30 ft = 144k cuft.
Though, I doubt you'd want to stack them like that, and I imagine you'd need more than just the reactors to replace the engine.
But more importantly - container ships need space and weight for ~66k gallons of diesel per day - about ~3M gallons total. That's an additional ~401k cuft for diesel, and ~13,500 tons... Each TEU is 22 tons - so you could probably carry an additional 600 TEU (or ~3.5% more).
[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/the-largest-and-most-p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
$200/MWh is $2/kWh. California electricity prices are around $0,27/kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/). I guess you mean $200/GWh?
Also, why do you find PG&Ek’s pricing unreasonable, given that it required a “phenomenally large capital investment” (and, I expect, quite a bit of ongoing maintenance) to be able to provide customers with electricity?
$200/MWh is $0.20/kWh.
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
But your argument is solid for a factory with constant 24/7 load where a single building might consume all that power.
Or you can overprovision, discard unused output (or try to do something useful — even just heating up a big heat reservoir is useful for district heating if you feel like building out a system to deliver the heat), and still potentially win on overall price.
Large grids are economical when reasonably run. They are not economical when poorly run.
Residential solar plans in Sydney would buy power back for about 5c US / kwh so $50 / mwh
Although I think their hand might be forced to encourage solar. They used to pay crazy high amounts.
PG&E is expensive.
a. The actual transmission system is a phenomenally large capital investment developed over many decades. You can’t just VC up a new electric grid in a developed area. And the incumbent mostly owns it.
b. Regulation, good and bad.
It’s possible to sell power to the utility for a reasonable price per MWh. But one can’t easily sell to the utility’s customers.
But this reactor is small! 5 MW could serve maybe 1000 expensive homes in an expensive area without an enormous transmission system. Anyone trying to disrupt the incumbent utility with something like this has $200/MWh of inefficiency to exploit. $24k per day of operation will offset a decent amount of capital cost of regulatory effort to get the electricity to customers.
Put another way, a wealthy community could buy a few of these, figure out local distribution, and ditch the incumbent utility. This could be fantastic.