California Solved This Faster Than Nuclear

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]If your answer to doubling or tripling demand is nuclear, you just told me your plan involves starting construction today on plants that will not come online until 2045 at the earliest. And you're going to spend somewhere between $6 and 12 billion per plant before you flip a single switch. And that's assuming they come in on time and on budget. Spoiler, they never do.

[00:00:22]California just had 12,000 megawatts of battery storage, the equivalent of 12 of those plants. And most utility scale battery storage projects, they are being deployed in around 12 months from contract to commissioning. Residential storage with recent permit reforms, it can be deployed in days at scale across a large region like California. Not years, not decades. We're talking days.

[00:00:44]So when someone tells me we should wait for nuclear instead of deploying batteries, what they're really saying is we should spend $40 billion and wait 20 years for the same capacity that California just built and turned on. The future is not waiting for us to finish this debate. It is already being disalled today.