The industry can let a simple CO2 scam penetrate this deep, makes people wonder how much independent thinking skills and backbone the group has... so come off your high horse.. The reality is you fell victim to the politicians pushing a money grabbing agenda. You still don't get a simple logical argument that coal is basically getting the same treatment that renewables have been getting.
Yeah this was in the '90's. I had 400 MW of spin in the system. In the summer that could be 200 MW. As I spun down I'd turn on my own peakers and buy emergency power - usually from AEP. I would also have to rapidly assess the nature and estimated length of the outage and buy make-up power pronto before the marketers got wind of anything. In fact, I'd usually run over a marketer if I could - Enron hated my guts.
If you rolled Enron good on ya! I got to experience the rolling blackouts they caused in CA with their shenanigans purposely taking plants offline. Bastards managed to set the industry back a decade at least.