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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

You don't need specific plants that act as perfectly reliable base load. If a bunch of auxiliary fossil fuel plants come online for 10 days per year, that's almost as good as never using them.

There's a maintenance cost, of course, but as far as carbon goals it's very doable.

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The economics of that don’t even come within the same universe as working out. Those plants wouldn’t just be losing money, they’d be losing unfathomably huge amounts of money.

I mean y'all can downvote all you like but that doesn't change the financials of shuttering a powerplant. How tf you gonna retain the skilled employees required to run the damn thing when they're furloughed 300 days out of the year?

So don't furlough people...?

Maintenance can be spread over the entire year, and you can use designs that don't need a big workforce just to run.

Peaker plants already exist, this isn't a crazy new realm in the operational sense.

I dunno, seems pretty wild to me. If the thing isn't generating electricity you're sitting there with a huge labor bill and nothing to show for it. That this sort of thing might make sense from a purely technical perspective seems reasonable to me but I don't see how you'd fund it.

If you're worried strictly about profits, and not a strong desire to avoid CO2 emissions, we can imagine a carbon tax. $100 per ton would cost a coal plant 10¢/kWh on top of operating costs. So if a carbon-free source gets even close for operating costs, then that's a lot of money to fund a backup plant and still come out ahead.

And this doesn't really require a tax. We could imagine an electrical company pricing out their aversion to carbon in cents per kWh out of their own volition or because of customer demand.

Given we live in a capitalist society that profit motive takes primacy isn't really in question.

That's a very narrow view. Either don't make the plants independently owned, or pay the plants for keeping the capacity available, or pay them a huge markup for those 10 days. Two and a half good solutions!

> economics of that don’t even come within the same universe as working out

Natural gas does this fine. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

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