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No, you have to buy them. They have owners - they're private infrastructure. The owners intend to sell power from them. If they can't do that, then they're goin
by XorNot 3y ago
No, you have to buy them. They have owners - they're private infrastructure. The owners intend to sell power from them. If they can't do that, then they're going to either try to sell the asset, or demolish the asset and use the land for something else.
The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore.
So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go.
Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
- oezi 3y agoSince the writing is on the wall that these power plants are mostly worthless in the foreseeable future most energy companies had to reduce the asset worth of the power plants already considerably. Who would want to buy such legacy tech? Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
- XorNot 3y agoDoesn't sound very doomed if your entire energy strategy is completely dependent on it. Oh and you know... They're a lot cheaper per reliable kWh then any other option (green methane would require solar power to be an order of magnitude cheaper then it currently is - not impossible but it also hasn't happened yet and may not).
- Gasp0de 3y agoThey will be paid not for the energy they produce but for the ability to produce energy on demand. It's a grid operation cost and is already financed as such in Europe. Companies can sell the guarantee to produce a certain amount of energy within X seconds and they are compensated for that. In combination with the low LCOE of renewables, it is way cheaper than nuclear power for example.
- XorNot 3y agoThe current bid for demand response though is still higher then for conventional operation, and piggybacks off the infrastructure for gas supply which runs constantly If you don't have regularly operating gas power stations any more, then the cost for underproduction protection is going to be a lot higher - because rather then running an extra turbine or increasing fuel burn, you have to justify the whole powerplant and it's sort infrastructure existing.