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Seems like they could essentially reserve a block of capacity (provided by the nukes) as being outside of the market, no? If the nuke plant has a planned or unp
by avidphantasm 5y ago
Seems like they could essentially reserve a block of capacity (provided by the nukes) as being outside of the market, no? If the nuke plant has a planned or unplanned outage of some or all capacity, that reserve capacity could temporarily be reduced to give a larger slice to the market. Seems like a fairly straightforward way to accommodate the need to ensure for reliability.
- 7thaccount 5y agoEasy to do on paper, but probably hard in reality. If you do that, pretty soon you don't have a market. It can also suppress prices as well by having too much capacity online I think. There's a lot of moving parts. One question to ask yourself is who is going to pay for this block of nuke capacity? It would be very expensive to pay for that on a 24/7 basis "just in case". The market already clears reserves for a variety of contingency events and it's certainly a balancing act to ensure you have enough without over paying for something you'll only need in ultra rare occasions. Part of the market philosophy is also not to signal out any one technology. You put in some requirements and let the economics find the cheapest solution. So you could ask for more reserves, but they probably wouldn't just come from nuke.