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Notes -
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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