Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor
If the price is right and medium size communities could get their acts together, something like this could potentially disrupt the entire grid model. In California, regardless of what wholesale electricity costs, the <i>retail</i> cost is something like $200/MWh more than could be considered reasonable. Put another way, the utility (PG&E) is charging an immense premium.  Normally, displacing PG&E would be impractical:<p>a. The actual transmission system is a phenomenally large capital investment developed over many decades.  You can’t just VC up a new electric grid in a developed area.  And the incumbent mostly owns the existing infrastructure.<p>b. Regulation, good and bad.<p>It’s possible to sell power <i>to the utility</i> for a reasonable price per MWh.  But one can’t easily sell to the utility’s customers.<p>But this reactor is small!  5 MW could serve maybe 1000 expensive homes in an expensive area without an enormous transmission system.  Anyone trying to disrupt the incumbent utility with something like this has $200/MWh of inefficiency to exploit. $24k per <i>day</i> of operation will offset a decent amount of capital cost and regulatory effort to get the electricity to customers.<p>Put another way, a wealthy community could buy a few of these, figure out local distribution, and ditch the incumbent utility. This could be fantastic.