just wondering if there may be some justification in legacy carbon based generators feeling used because they are expected to be available to provide base load at any time wind etc. doesn't,

What ticks off the baseload coal burners is not that they don't get to provide baseload. Because they do. It is that other people get to provide baseload as well.

A newly built coal-burner has similar economics to a wind farm - high up-front costs, low(ish) variable costs (if you exclude the subsidy-by-dead-Chinese-coal-miner). Which means that insistence on marginal pricing locks out new coal almost as effectively as it locks out new wind.

... but fully amortised coal has an equity cushion to survive higher volatility. Which means it gets to benefit from the higher average prices (due to the lock-out of capital intensive low average cost producers). If you repair the market structure to allow wind farms in, you undercut that particular source of rent for old, fully amortised coal-burners.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

As to the pragmatic question of what happens if if where they end up on the merit order curve leaves them unable to cover their financial capital obligations ... someone ends up taking a financial haircut, and the asset is revalued, either internally or on sale, as back-up generating capacity.

If a sound energy policy is pursued, its not necessary to expand the capacity of the coal-fired generators in particular, so the fact that their legacy capital costs might not be covered is no threat to the real system. Its a financial loss, sure, but covering for that is just corporate welfare ~ in a more capitalist version of corporatism, we'd apply the rule that you pays your money and you takes your chances.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.