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| A few folks above actually hit pretty close to home on the real cause. There was some curtailed wind genetation, but by FAR the main cause of blackouts was that HALF of the expected peak fossil gen was not able to come online for various reasons. So to prevent a catastrophic cascading total blackout some areas were shutdown. A terrible situation but totally false that this was caused by renewables.
And as a former coal plant worker, those things do not just spin up from cold in a few minutes. It takes days in ideal conditions. A running plant can ramp up easy enough, but its a whole different animal to do a cold start full ramp up.
And as far as cost competitiveness goes in the current market, in order from cheapest to expensive it is gas combined cycle,coal,nuke,gas peaker turbine.
Nuke is FAR from the cheapest, but you can thank burecrats for that. There is quite literally paperwork to file and manage to turn a single bolt at one of those plants. You would not believe the O&M dollars needed to keep those places running.
Edited by eng25 2/19/2021 18:38
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