How deceptive of you to leave out the rest of the quote...
“We also had a significant injection of new supply in this auction.”
And the addition is not 1000MW, it’s 5000MW of new power generation. The 4000MW were not lost, they will be temperarily shut down because they couldn’t compete for the time being, and they are in reserve, and can be brought back on line when needed.
And, yes, I’m sure there’s was a softening in demand too.
But that wasn’t my point of my original comment. It was about the misleading headline of the article that made it sound like they were going to have to shut down the grid, and thus bad news for the customers. And based on the comments, many took it that way. That’s why I said “read the article”.
It’s actually good news for the customers.
They can be maintained as hot spinning reserve burning fuel and with an operations crew on hand; but,that doesn't save much in operations cost does it? They also will require a bit of time to come to full load--several hours--as opposed to a straight gas turbine peaking plant, which can accept load within minutes from a cold start.
The wind and solar feeding the grid changes delivered power very rapidly at times, thus the dependence on gas fueled turbines to frequency stabilize the grids on a very short time scale. The price of gas fuel for these turbines is bottoming for now; but, will escalate in price quickly once the lack of replacement wells curtails supply once again. For now the grid suppliers are operating at a loss on the base load equipment.