[nate_meurer]

Exactly right. Indeed, the inability of "baseload" power plants to curtail their output is a big part of the reason they are rapidly becoming uneconomical to run.

Here's what Erica Bowman, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, says about it:

> Baseload is kind of a historical term. It’s not really relevant to how electricity is produced today…What you need is dispatchability... and [coal and nuclear] are far slower when you compare them to a lot of the technology natural gas plants have.