But right. California at least recalled their governor. Tx sent Bush II to Washington.
Running as a peaker plant only, if it really is possible to operate solely in that manner, will have to change. Running every hour of the year will result in the lowest cost/hr operating cost, but it isn't possible when the demand is not there every hour of the year. Neither is it fair to the consumers to define your operating cost by assuming that you will only operate for the very few number of hours that maximum, market capped price will be in effect. That results in the maximum hourly operating cost. Yet it is apparent that there is room for these peaker plants to recover their investment and make a fair profit, if they can run for certain percentages of the time, I.e. during which electricity prices are above their break even costs including a fair profit. The running costs for various generator types I've seen in widely published data is well known, so it is apparent that profits can be made at well below market cap levels. Thus it would seem that all we have to do is decide what a fair profit is and dispatch electricity orders to available generators according to a running cost ranking. Those with the lowest running costs get priority bookings, which would encourage lowest cost electricity production at all times.
We should also set a level playing field amongst all producers. All approved generators should meet certain design standards and availability criteria, so no producer could have unfair competitive advantage by not winterizing, or otherwise providing appropriate equipment in his plant to operate inside whatever range of conditions his region would experience during, say a 25yr or a 50yr, or 100yr upset event condition. Various equipment could be assigned different event criteria according to criticality of that equipment to the specific event in question and its likelihood of failure. No generator would be allowed to inject, if it did not meet all criteria, perhaps even one of a max minimum_operating_cost, including whatever profit the genco targeted. They would be forced to go offline by prohibition of the grid purchasing their electricity until their min op cost was reduced. No substandard electricity allowed.
Dispatch of electricity orders to the gencos would have to be proportioned according to grid load, location of loads and gens, current and near future state prediction, and type of gen. Base and variable loads would not be distributed solely by generator type, a certain percentage of each being proportioned to each gen according to type and response time in their ability to control output to some extent and the variability expected in demand and production predictions. For example, solar might supply some % base load, some % of variable load and do some battery charging of reserves. Nothing says that coal electricity must be used for base load only, that's just the ideal purpose of building such a plant. The part of base load they replaced from coal or nuclear production could be compensated for by directing some of the coal power to pumped storage, battery charging, or in future, maybe to H2 production with the rest being used for the remaining base load not supplied by other means. Once in the grid, the electricity doesn't have labels of origen and may be used for a multitude of purposes. The storage provider will pay for electricity going in and will receive payment for that going out. Maybe it will be possible to store it at low prices and release it when higher market prices prevail. Depends on how risk sharing arrangements are made, or not.
If some sharing of base and peaker loads cannot be made practical, then peakers will have to be paid for spinning reserves or standby capacity and be compensated without actually injecting power into the grid. Maybe plants with multiple generators will need to go to split duty, being called upon to generate and inject from 1 unit for enough hours when prices are within one, or two standard deviations of average price - their running costs to recover their yearly costs and a reasonable profit for all units. I haven't run any numbers on this, but it seems possible to a large extent to be able to do that.
In any case, it certainly seems impossible to continue running large grids that have little means to control supply and demand by nothing other than setting near arbitrary caps probably by people that most likely have little experience or any idea of what they are playing with and can set that can change at a moments notice by several orders of magnitude.
Oh wait. We're probably doing a lot of that, except for design standards and setting moving average + 1 Std.dev price caps.
The days of the "Texas Cowboy Grid" certainly seem to be numbered.
