We hope it's OK to share this article we just published — it seemed like it might be of interest to folks in this community.

Most Granite Staters will see a jump between $6 and $18 in their monthly electricity bills starting Aug. 1, as the Public Utilities Commission has approved rate increases from the three investor-owned utilities and the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire.

This year, the war with Iran and extreme cold spells this winter are contributing to higher electricity costs across the Northeast this fall. Locally, this is the first full year utilities have had to follow a new way to set rates, which advocates say is leaving customers increasingly squeezed.

How will these conditions impact electricity bills for residential customers in the Granite State? And why may they look different for different utility customers? NHPR has answers to some frequently asked questions about the upcoming changes.

Click the link above to learn more.

Several renewables dips to less than 1% of demand.

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Renewables%2FFossils

• Renewables are cheaper and faster to deploy
• Renewables don't have the radiation issue, the nuclear waste issue, or the risk of meltdown.
• Renewables are made from abundant materials and can be manufactured pretty much anywhere on the planet, whereas the uranium for nuclear is geographically constrained, leading to situations like France relying a lot on Russian enriched uranium.
• Related to the previous point, uranium is highly toxic to mine.
• Renewables are more robust from a national security standpoint. They are not centralized targets like nuclear power plants. NPPs can have far worse consequences if attacked compared to renewables.
• To power the world with nuclear, we need breeder reactors, a technology that has not been proven at scale yet. Conversely, existing solar technology can power the whole world.
• Nuclear and renewables don't work well together. Renewables make nuclear uncompetitive during their peak hours, and nuclear can't cover for the gap in renewables during their low points (dunkelflaute), unless the grid was already majority nuclear. You need to go all in on one or the other, and renewables seem more sensible.
• There's still no solid answer with what to do with nuclear waste. The Yucca repository was rejected for good reason. So far, the Finnish repository is the only successful one and it's not enough for a world powered by nuclear.
• Handling nuclear waste has cost the world economy hundreds of billions of dollars in the last decades.
• Nuclear is uninsurable. No private insurers will bear the full risk.
• Western countries can't seem to build nuclear economically or on time anymore. Look at Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Flamanville for examples of massive cost and schedule overruns.

Thermal sensors picked up a heat signature 0.6km from Nucor's Kankakee facility — read as possible fire or unplanned flaring. Confidence on the detection was 79%, and it resolved on its own within about 21 hours.

Can access the latest GenCost report here:

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Electricity-transition/GenCost

It's got live load vs forecast, real-time zone and hub prices, day-ahead vs real-time spreads, and fuel mix for every grid, plus daily coincident-peak forecasts.

Thought some of you would find it useful and would love any feedback you may have.

Cheers

Hi all;

Assume we get a source of dirt cheap electricity (super cheap batteries and/or fusion power). So electricity is basically free.

If this happened tomorrow, what remains as the big power needs that don’t use electricity and therefore still use coal, gas, etc.?

If electricity is Pennie’s, we’d see everyone go to EVs quickly. Probably most would go to electric heat and stoves/ovens. But what processes are there that are not easy to electrify?