Economics

What can be done to return to the historical trend? What happened? h/t @pmarca

President of Antares Industries. Mom to 2 little boys. Nuclear energy advocate. Formerly SpaceX and Opendoor. Angel investor. 

🇧🇷🇺🇸-  Book: Making Things Think: https://holloway.com/mtt. Investor in Wander, Carry, Footprint, Merkle Manufactory (Farcaster), Dynamic, Paragraph.

Utilities companies are currently rent-seeking entities. Disruption is badly needed. Increased investment in electrical transmission, and modern nuclear technology would be my opinion. But there needs to be true competition or price controls (tied to previously agreed upon electrical rates) depending on region. Otherwise monopoly pricing will keep costs high.

The fairly obvious answer: nuclear isn't cost-efficient because of the regulations surrounding it; Julia/packy mention cement costs alone as an absorbent cost in the podcast.

Oil and gas reserves aren't looking for the price to go down by draining the supply faster than we already are— that behavior ended 10 years ago mostly

The permafrost gas in Russia would reduce European costs

The bill has come due for supporting grid infrastructure.  Utilities are spending more money on reliability than on new MW of generation.  So unlikely to come down on a per kWh basis. 

Also, interesting to think about is what effect PURPA (1978) may have had, originally meant to drive efficiency -> more kWh per kW.