The Origins of the TVA

The modern electricity grid is a weird thing. The delivery of electricity is a natural monopoly, for kind of obvious reasons. Despite that, we still attempt to shoehorn market-based mechanisms into the system. Many utilities are shareholder-owned, yet heavily regulated. In many markets around the country, producers of natural gas, wind, coal, nuclear, solar and so on, compete to sell their electricity into the grid. Now that we're looking for ways to decarbonize the grid, we're running headlong into complications and perverse outcomes of what we've built. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Matt Huber, a professor at Syracuse University, and Fred Stafford, a pseudonymous writer who talks about energy markets, grid history, and nuclear power. We talk to them about how we got the current grid, and why nuclear energy in particular is squeezed out of existing markets.

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