Both. Combined Cycle Nat Gas efficiency MW/BTU are running now 60% and up. This means more dollars to operate for just boilers that can be feed with coal or gas. Dual Fuel System is likely even going add up to more dollars to build, but so far out of the norm no real data to look at.
Coals problem is the modern emission requirements. Scrubbers can consume 1/3 of the total plant output before the electrons cross the fence.
Wind was never much of the plan, as I pointed out before. It is not dispatchable or dependable. That is why the Ercot 2020~2021 winter plan had little dependence on it. Wind was producing at the planed rate. Nat Gas, along with some problems from coal and nuke, was down nearly 6 times the expected worse case. A couple more MW of problems with demand higher than believed would hit max.
Guess I still believe that, although combined cycle gas might be the most operationally efficient, coal could still be the lower cost MW producer, even with the scrubbing. Is that incorrect?
And I know about the problems with all the different power plants freezing up.
What I was curious about was the % of generated power per type that was actually down.
Wind we know was 50% of output.
Natural Gas seems to be pretty high downtime as well due to freezing.
Nuclear % down is dependent upon that one Bay City reactor that might have been down for awhile
Coal am unsure about.
The point is during the past week when things went haywire, seems a larger % of all natural gas generation MW had problems than experience by coal and nuclear generation, maybe even for longer periods of time.
Am still attempting to focus on the reliability factor rather than a simple statement "They all had problems".
For example(and hypothetically), if all the generated MW power produced by coal had a one hour episode of downtime in only one of the 20 plants producing power, then that sure seems nothing much at all compared to all the generated MW power produced by natural gas having a 3 day event downtime episode at 25% of all the plants.