Correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't most of these coal plants well past their useful life which is also adding to the increase maintenance cost? I mean MDU is retiring their plants and replacing them with NG generators because they claim its half the cost of continuing to run the outdated coal plants.
You are wrong MDu’s plant they are retiring are small mw and built in the 50s the other plants in question are much higher mw and better technology in both emission and output. GRE sunk their ship with the spirit wood plant build imo. Also I don’t think mdu has committed to ng plants fully I think they are waiting to see what happens with power prices. The problem is because of subsidies wind can be sold at a negative price and still be profitable to the companies, so even though the large baseload plants are producing power extremely cheap, they can’t compete, thus causing them to throttle back these plants to provide only the needed load sometimes running them at 20-50%. When they were built they were made to run wide open and often throughout the years were upgraded to output more, because the cost for added mw was going to be made back in no time. I have no direct tie to coal or wind but do put a lot of miles on in our state and personally hate seeing wind towers ruining the country side, imagine what they will look like when they are rundown and the companies who own them go bankrupt and leave them sitting on the landscape.
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Layman’s terms I make bottled water from a spring and it costs me 50 cents to make a bottle, because I need to pay multiple spring owners to put my bottle plants on there land. nestle makes similar water but it costs them 15 cents a bottle. Since my water is green and is natural and non treated I am receiving a 40 cent subsidy for x amount of years because it’s green. Both mine and nestles water sells for 55 cents a bottle at first we are both making money, me at 45 them at 40cents, but soon a bunch of people see the minimal risk of bottling water because of the subsidies and all of a sudden there are excess water bottlers. plus now nestle has been mandated to make 50% of their total water produced from green sources. Since the green is making more money they fall in line. Soon the price of water is now selling for 12cents a bottle because of tons of excess on the market, so even though my water costs 50 cents a bottle to make with the subsidy i am making 2 cents a bottle while nestle is losing 3 cents a bottle. Nestle reaches out to me and says we need to buy your water company or build one, I see the water market is going to dry up so I sell out. Nestle renegotiate with the spring owners to reduce cost 2 cents. Nestle needs a million bottles a day to fulfill their orders but they can only make 500k green bottles, so they need to still make 500k of their non green bottles at a loss, even though now it cost 20 cents to make because the 10 cent cost was at full load. Bad part is somedays they need to make 700k because the green source can’t produce its full 500k quota because the spring freezes every night until noon. So finally nestle opens a bunch more green stations to meet its quota and decides now that they can get rid of their 1 million bottle plant and replace it with a 200k plant that has less overhead and is made to completely start up or shut off whenever it is needed it cost 35 cents a bottle but maintenance is less and it may not have to operate often. 10 years later subsidies are up price of water more than triples to 45 cents a bottle soon a majority of the smaller green bottlers go broke because they are losing money. Nestle however has weathered the storm and now justify raising the price of water to 3.00 a bottle, because they need to build new plants to keep up with the new demand and now the cheapest they can make water is 90 cents. Now the old green springs have dried up and need to be refurbished at a cost of 2.00 a bottle so they scrap that idea and give the water company to the govt who now wants to increase subsidies for a new water production that uses heaps of shit in Washington And so on and so forth.
