Reliable vs. Intermittent Generation: A Primer (Part I)
By Bill Schneider -- March 1, 2023
“Why should a thermal plant spend money in a government-rigged market that threatens a reasonable profit? Why should the plant even remain in the market under these conditions?”
This two-part post is a follow-up to Robert Bradley’s recent IER article, “Wind, Solar, and the Great Texas Blackout: Guilty as Charged.” His article discussed how regulatory shifts and subsidies favoring Intermittently Variable Renewable Energy (IVRE) producers resulted in prematurely lost capacity, a lack of new capacity, and upgrade issues with remaining (surviving) traditional capacity. These three factors–‘the why behind the why’–explain the perfect storm that began with (or was revealed by) Storm Uri.
Part I below describes how the market was originally meant to work–but has not worked given the governmentally redesigned responsibility of power generators. The change was caused by:
Investment monies lured away from developing baseload capacity by government subsidies and special tax incentives, and
Operating opportunities lured away by “first-use” mandates. First-use mandates are especially pernicious as grid operators must purchase from IVREs whenever producing, leaving the reliable generators idle.
The Distortion
https://www.masterresource.org/renewable-energy-fallacies/reliable-vs-intermittent-schneider-i/
