Maybe you remember that phrase from the song High Hopes. It was made famous by several actors way back around 1960. Well, the low wholesale electricity prices seem to have created a new worry for the nuclear fleet.
This is going to be very telling. Is wholesale price the right metric for all power sources? How can that price capture any value for carbon when carbon is not traded? Or, does this fear of closing nuclear plants now make it clear that we must price carbon into the market?
Who knew that power once thought too cheap to even meter would now be declared uneconomic?
According to Wikipedia, the phrase “too cheap to meter” is attributed to Walter Marshall, a pioneer of nuclear power in the United Kingdom. The phrase was coined by Lewis Strauss, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who in a 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers said:
“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter… It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”
