Georgia has some of the largest coal plants in the country. The power company (Georgia Power, part of Southern Company) was allowed to pre-bill customers for the costs of the new plant well over a decade in advance. If you lived in Georgia before the new units came online, you paid to have them built but received no benefit from them. Investors in Southern Company received unwarranted protection from the consequences of poor project implementation and cost overruns on the back of the utility's customers.
I mean, all that data is also from when California and New York both had operational reactors.
In 2013, CA generated 17 out of 200 GW from nuclear. GA generated 32/120 GW. NY generated 44/136GW. So at least in the case of New York, it generated more power from nuclear as a percentage than GA, and had higher electricity prices, so there doesn't seem to be a correlation. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/
But the thing still remains: the supposed Vogtle 3/4 boondoggle of gazzilions of dollars of cost overruns did not result in consumers paying more for electricity. Sure, historically they used to pay less than the national average, but they continue to pay less than the national average, and by about the same amount. The cause could be regulation or deregulation, or better geographic position, or whatever. But the consumers are not paying more, after Vogtle 3, am I right?
One can look at the cost of the alternatives and see I'm speaking the truth. Also, demand didn't increase as much as the (likely fraudulent) projections used to justify Vogtle 3/4.
All the "nuclear renaissance" nuclear builds aside from Vogtle 3/4 were cancelled because the utilities realized the alternatives were much better economically. V. C. Summer was cancelled after dropping $9B on it. Even with that sunk cost, it still wasn't worth completing.
What happened between back then and now is two (well, three) things: fracking crashed the price of natural gas, demand didn't increase as much as utilities said it would, and then (later, after fracking) renewables also became much MUCH cheaper. One can excuse the nuclear industry for not seeing this would happen (or perhaps for not wanting to see that it would happen), but that doesn't change the fact that it did happen, and that the nuclear builds turned out to be economically unjustifiable.
Things got so bad for nuclear we were seeing already completed NPPs being shut down because they couldn't even make an operating profit! The other reactor at TMI had been cash flow negative for the last six years it was in operation, for example. In that sort of environment, building a new NPP (which would also have to amortized construction and financing costs) would be totally out of the question economically.
Comparing to the national average is clearly dishonest on your part, since those rates can differ for other reasons. What matters is the difference between what Georgia rate payers would pay with or without Vogtle 3/4.
What’s interesting about those numbers is that Georgia generates much more power per person than California or New York. Georgia has a population of 10 million. California is at 40
Million and New York 20 million.
