I’m not really understanding your second paragraph here. To expand upon your example by adding some numbers, let me see if I understand what you are saying.
Your current electricity bill is $100. The price triples to $300 but you get a fixed rebate (from the government?) of $200 so the net cost to you remains unchanged at $100. You then would be incented to reduce your usage as a 1% decline in usage results in a lowering of your net cost by $3 versus a $1 reduction at the current price level. Do I understand your example correctly?
Even under this strange example (if I understand you correctly), the incentive is still costs and not prices.
As a general comment on nuclear power, don’t we need to focus our comparisons of nuclear with natural gas and coal as opposed to oil? In countries like France that rely heavily on nuclear power for electricity generation, do they use less oil as a transportation fuel compared to their peers? I guess what I am getting at is that I would assume that France simply imports less LNG because of their high nuclear use as opposed to reducing their oil usage. I very well may be wrong in this assumption though.
I don’t think that heavy useage of nuclear corresponds to oil as much as coal and LNG as you pointed out. I think it’s the environmental impact that is key in the nuclear vs coal/LNG comparison. Oil as used for personal transport is pretty much a separate issue…unless you start talking about something like hydrogen as an alternative (which as a carrier fuel can be generated using nuclear energy, among other ways).
Sorry if this post is a bit chaotic…writing it on my phone while waiting for a flight.
I agree - giving the rebate doesn’t provide any incentive to end users to reduce their consumption. I don’t see how you can set up a system that says you’re really using $300 of energy, but you’re only going to pay $100, just like it did before. Where’s the incentive there?
There certainly is a difference between price and cost - we pay a much higher cost than price for most energy, through health care costs to deal with air and other pollution, subsidies for energy production (so you pay higher taxes than you would otherwise have to), military protection of sea lanes for the oil tankers, that little brouhaha in Iraq, etc. I recall seeing a study a few years ago, which I can’t seem to find anymore, that estimated (even in the late 90s) that the cost of gasoline was close to $10/gal when you included all those things. So we were (and still are) paying a subsidized price rather than the cost, but until recently there hasn’t been much in the way of an incentive to reduce consumption.