Comment by eliben
1 day ago
Yes. Counterintuitive, but it make sense when you take all the factors into account (such that completely shutting down and then later restarting turbines may cost a generator more than paying someone to take power off their hands).
Yup. What people have to realize is that power generation has inertia and can be painful to start/stop. But also, the power output always has to match the power demand. If you don't, you get either brown outs or over voltages.
When you add sources like solar onto the grid, you end up with times of the day where high solar production pushes base load power generators to need to slow down or shutdown.