Comment by Sabinus

Not in China. China has lots of coal but has to import gas, so they build coal peakers instead of gas peakers. China builds their coal plants a little differently so they spin up faster, but mostly they just use plain old weather prediction. 4 hour weather prediction is highly accurate, so they know far enough in advance to know when to spin up the coal.

So, if you have plentiful natural gas, then, yes, certainly, that's what you'll do; it's far, far easier and cheaper. China does not have plentiful natural gas, and is indeed building coal peaker plants.

Scroll through the last 72 hours here and you can kind of see it in action: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CN/72h/hourly

Now, clearly, there's a long way to go, and China does still have a lot of baseload coal. But it's not building much if any _new_ baseload coal.

Think that's weird? France has load-following _nuclear_ plants (it more or less has to, given how much of its grid is nuclear).

not if your country doesn't have natural gas