We tend to talk about electrification as if it were an incremental shift. A bit more load here, a bit more capacity there.
It isn’t.
It’s a change in scale.
The amount of power we are trying to move is no longer in the same regime as before. At some point, the question stops being how to extend what we already have, and becomes whether the underlying approach still makes sense.
At lower voltages, you can keep adding lines. Spread the load. Build around constraints. It works—up to a point.
But each new line comes with its own footprint. More land taken. More corridors cut. More people affected, each one just enough to remain acceptable.
Individually, the decisions look reasonable.
Together, they don’t.
What changes at higher voltage is not just capacity. It’s geometry.
A single line begins to replace several. Losses over distance stop dominating. The system becomes something you can shape deliberately, instead of patching together.
At that point, the question is no longer whether 800 kV is excessive.
It’s whether anything below it is still aligned with what we are trying to build.
***
Electricity has no memory.
Once it enters the grid, it loses its origin. A kilowatt-hour from solar, a battery, or a turbine is indistinguishable from any other. The system sees flow, not history.
But taxation still assumes history.
You pay when energy enters your storage system. Someone else pays again when it leaves. Not because it is different energy, but because the system cannot recognize that it isn’t.
The same kilowatt-hour, twice.
The system sees flow.
The tax sees history.
Flat taxes make it worse. Every pass through storage looks like new consumption. The system quietly penalizes the very flexibility it increasingly depends on.
There are ways to soften it.
If taxation follows value instead of volume, the distortion shrinks. Charging happens when prices are low. Discharging offsets high-value consumption. The double layer remains, but its effect fades.
Removing it entirely would require something cleaner: taxing only final use, or explicitly netting storage cycles.
Both are straightforward in principle.
Neither is simple in practice.
So the real question is not how to eliminate the imperfection.
It is whether we are willing to keep a system that discourages the behavior we are trying to encourage.
***
Small modular reactors are often presented as a natural fit for combined heat and power.
The argument sounds straightforward: place the reactor close to demand, take heat directly, avoid conversion losses, keep everything local.
But the thermodynamics are less decisive than they first appear.
If you take heat from a turbine cycle in a conventional pressurized water reactor, you are not creating heat from nothing. You are redirecting it. For every unit of heat extracted, you give up a fraction of electrical output—on the order of a few tenths. Not negligible, but not dominant either.
Viewed another way, that same electricity could have been used to drive a heat pump.
And large heat pumps, when designed properly, operate in that same range of effectiveness. One unit of electricity becomes several units of heat. Different path, similar outcome.
So the advantage is not where it first seems to be.
It is not in efficiency.
Which leaves a more uncomfortable question: if the thermodynamics are roughly comparable, why introduce a more expensive way of generating heat?
Because the system is not defined by thermodynamics alone.
There are places where moving electricity is harder than moving heat. Where grid capacity is already constrained, but district heating networks are close and inexpensive to extend. Where the demand is steady, local, and not easily shifted.
There are also cases where the temperature itself matters—where the required heat is above what large heat pumps can easily provide, or where integrating them would place new burdens on the grid at exactly the wrong time.
And then there is siting.
A large reactor assumes space, infrastructure, and acceptance that are not always available. A smaller unit changes that geometry. Not by being better in principle, but by fitting where something larger cannot.
Seen from that angle, the role of SMRs becomes clearer.
They are not a more efficient way to produce heat.
They are a way to place heat where the rest of the system makes other options difficult.
And if electricity is not the constraint—if the need is simply for large amounts of steady, low-cost heat—the logic simplifies further.
At that point, the turbine itself starts to look optional.
Remove the turbine.
The reactor gets smaller.
The system gets quieter.
Nothing is optimized for electricity anymore. Only for heat.
A machine designed to do one thing, in the place where that thing is needed.
In that sense, heat-only reactors are not a compromise.
They are what remains when you stop designing around electricity and start designing around demand.