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How can they be legally blocked from ever taking a loss? It is a market. They bid.

There's a plethora of producers with varying equipment, startup times, ramp times, costs and so on.

As renewable penetration expands the most expensive, or least flexible ones are called in fewer and fewer hours until they shut down. If one oil and gas producer tries to raise prices a competitor steps in and fills the demand.

Did you think there was this one monopoly oil and gas power producing able to dictate prices at will?

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> How can they be legally blocked from ever taking a loss? It is a market. They bid.

I don't know enough about oil & gas to tell you what is happening there, but not every market truly operates as a free market.

For example, nuclear power plants almost always have a contract with the government for a specific electricity price: if the market pays more the profits will go to the government, if the market pays less the government subsidizes production. Something similar happened with early wind power.

[ViewTrick1002]

Yes, that is a CFD. CFDs are allocated in bidding processes to get them as cheaply as possible.

Oil and gas plants in Europe are very much not on CFDs. They can bid out their power using futures. But that is like any other market.