My knowledge might be old but I’ve been told one of the biggest expense for a utility are actually Peakers (more formally known as Peaking power plants). Besides the fact they’re costly to operate compared to normal power plants (about 3X of generating cost), it takes a lot to warm up these power plants at a moment notice. VPP (as shitty as the name is) would help our infrastructure a lot, and would be a net positive for society IMO.
> Besides the fact they’re costly to operate compared to normal power plants (about 3X of generating cost), it takes a lot to warm up these power plants at a moment notice.
Our solution in Toronto was to just run them half of the time all the time.
I think the warm-up cost isn’t really there when the plant is operating continuously.
Oddly for a peaker plant, they built these as combined cycle, which wouldn’t make financial sense if it was to only run for short periods.
A “true” peaker plant is inefficient but with lots of capacity but we basically build a “proper” power plant that has good efficiency, so it’s not too bad. But makes you wonder what went so wrong in the planning (even though the mistake turned out advantageous).
