Quote:
Originally Posted by WestCoastEcho
Correct in that hydro is great at reacting to demand, but natural gas power plants are just as quick. Most new natural gas power plants these days are in effect a jet engine bolted to the ground, where the gas turbine provides the bulk of the power, but the hot exhaust gas is at times used to provide heat for additional energy production by generating steam.
Gas turbines are a preferred power plant design for a natural gas power plant these days because it's so easily scalable (you can bring in additional generation capacity by literally plop down a new gas turbine power plant on the ground in a shipping container), are incredibly efficient (and this is always improving as new jet engine designs and technology always makes it down to other applications), and cheaper to build compared to traditional thermal natural gas.
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I think (not having actually worked on a turbine) that NG peakers still generally have a running cost even if they're idle. From what I know, most thermal generators generally keep at set temperature to avoid thermal cycling and fatigue.
That being said, peaker plants are likely to be replaced by batter storage in the near future anyways.