I wonder, what’s to stop an energy company with a mixture of RE and gas from disabling X% of their RE infrastructure, forcing gas to come online and the higher rate? Only the biggest producers control enough of the market to do it, but it seems plausible for the company to find specific demand scenarios where they could tip the price in their favor.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a big wind farm I drive by occasionally and sometimes most of the windmills are feathered. Some are turning, so there's clearly wind. I have assumed this is when the demand is low (or maybe negative).

	▲	hnaccount_rng 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s not necessarily true. In general a single windmill is more efficient at pulling energy out of the wind than two are. And the marginal costs of windmills are not zero. I.e. their maintenance cadence (also) scales with active hours. So it might be a “at this price-wind point it’s not profitable for us to run a second mill”