“The part that I really hate about the public grid, the incentives are all wrong. In this sort of cost plus, you're going to recover all your costs and then get a rate of return on top of it. That gives the regulated utilities every incentive to inflate costs. They get away with whatever they can. They put as much cost in there as humanly possible. And if the state board approves it, game on. They made some money.
That's been the wrong incentive for such a long time, especially on the on the wires part. Like we've gotten more efficient on the generation side because in part because of the restructuring, we have better incentives. We have actually unregulated generation assets, which is amazing. But you don't have unregulated networks.
You don't have unregulated wires, distribution, all the things that you can optimize. We don't know what that looks like yet. So what I'm dying to know is if you give a new network every incentive to be as cheap and efficient as possible, Without any element of it that's cost plus that's in this rate regulated environment, all of it is just drive it to the bone, drive the efficiency, drive the economics, drive the engineering to the bone. That's sort of the SpaceX model. It's like if you don't need it, cut it. If it's not working, figure it out. That approach to a grid, I am dying to know what that grid looks like.
Because we, for a hundred years, we've just gone with this model of, well, you know, wires are natural monopoly. What are you going to do? We have to do, you know, cost plus on all this stuff. We've got this, like the grid to me, the public grid to me looks like walking into the DMV. Everybody sucks.
Everybody's like, I don't mean to talk about the individual linemen. I'm talking about the decisions at sort of the corporate level. Everybody's just happy to be mediocre and make, you know, A sleepy return and not rock the boat too much. That moment, we're in a very different moment now. Maybe that was fine for a few decades.
I think we've come to terms with the fact that the grid is not meeting the moment and it's the rate limiter on economic growth. And there are a lot of us, myself included, for sure, there are a lot of us that are pissed off about that. We need to change that.
And if there's any hope of getting a glimpse into what sort of a SpaceX version of a power grid might be, Man, I am dying to see it.”
https://www.nuclearbarbarians.com/p/the-need-for-speed-ft-travis-fisher
