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From wikipedia: A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism, hydraulic society, hydraulic civilization, or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy.[1]
Often associated with these terms and concepts is the notion of a water dynasty. This body is a political structure which is commonly characterized by a system of hierarchy and control often based on class or caste. Power, both over resources (food, water, energy) and a means of enforcement such as the military, is vital for the maintenance of control.
TLDR: You become vassal of the US if you literally want to have lights on.
What prevents the client state from building sufficient capacity to not rely on the foreign plant? It's economically unfavorable while they can't get their shit together, sure, but that just means hard, not impossible or actively prevented. Or is your thought that the nuclear plant would be operated at a loss and price out other sources to cause dependency?
For what it’s worth, nuclear actually does tend to price very cheap per kWh. At least in markets which bid on capacity.
The cost to spin up a natural gas plant is relatively low. Coal is slower and thus more expensive. You don’t want to run one of those one day at a time; you want to keep it going overnight at lower capacity, even if that means selling the produced electricity for cheap. Then you spool back up for peak hours without having to pay startup costs again. Nuclear is much, much more extreme than this, and it also doesn’t need to stop very often. As a result, the nuclear plants in our market always bid a cheap floor so they’d be tapped to stay online. The only ones which bid lower were solar and hydro, since they would be producing whenever the sun/river was working.
This isn’t the same as operating at a loss, but it would have a chilling effect on building other plants. Same way that any other giant foreign investment could discourage a domestic competitor.
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As Europe has been learning for the past couple of years (aside from the French), this is true for natural gas as well- they had ample opportunity to learn back in '73 that American foreign policy own-goals/failures would affect them as well but chose not to for some reason.
Not at all. The thing is that for oil and gas because they can be stored switching supplies (in secret) is possible even if expensive. For electricity it is not. if you want to switch to different sphere of influence - you can't take over the powerplant before it gets made inoperable and any neighboring country that will be ramping up capacity to fill in the void can't hide it. So the state department can shut down in the worst possible for you moment.
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