It's weird though, if you look back at this week, yesterday for a few hours it was sunny _and_ windy in the middle of the day. That ought to depress the hell out of prices, most of the gas plants were idled. But for some reason a cold plant was fired up.

Did they lose money running that plant? Is there some setup where running the plant a certain amount (maybe on windy days when pollution effects in the vicinity are smallest) is just treated as a good thing even though we really ought to be burning less fossil fuels not more?

I don't understand the economics of coal versus gas in this space in a market like the UK. It seems as though with gas being cheaper it would just never make economic sense to burn coal when gas plants aren't 100% flat out. But clearly I am wrong somehow.