Idea: financing large capital cost electricity projects without raising rates

Read more at BraveNewClimate

“Guest post by Dr Gene Preston. Gene has had a long career as a power system engineer, performing generation planning, transmission planning, and distribution planning for Austin Energy. He is currently doing transmission studies for wind developers. He wrote all his own modeling software including the current network model used to perform his consulting studies. His PhD dissertation was in power system reliability, a composite generation and transmission probabilistic model, and is posted on his web page.

Today utilities are faced with a seemingly impossible problem. Renewables are more costly than non-renewables. How is a utility to invest in wind, solar, and new nuclear without causing unacceptably high rates? Before I suggest a solution, we need to consider the role wind, solar, and nuclear will play in the power system of tomorrow…”