One of the things I miss from when I lived in southern Alabama was just how cheap electricity was. Perhaps soon folks in that part of the country will also have similar feelings. From the AJC:
Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.
Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn’t result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region’s utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.
One thing I wonder, however—in other parts of the country, the grid is already strained. Perhaps there is sufficient generation capacity…but I thought there were issues with finding sufficient transmission capacity.
Time to encourage additional PV-installations, I suppose.