> No one talks that dispach-able power is often coal or oil.
... Because they're generally not, nearly anywhere. Oil power plants are, in general, rare today nearly everywhere in the world; natural gas really did a number on them. And dispatchable power plants are almost _never_ coal; the startup lead-time is too high (hours at least). Ignoring weird stuff like grid batteries and pumped storage plants, they're nearly always gas turbines.
For short term stabilization, say within time constant of fifteen minutes, of course you use hydro or nat gas.
But the electrical industry makes very careful predictions of the next day's power consumption; that is within a time frame that coal can easily respond to.
Since coal is expensive and dirty, they end up supplying the marginal production. Ie the buses run on coal.
But why keep coal at all though? One advantage coal over has is that you can store massive amounts of energy in a pile just outside the plant. Only nuclear plants can store such massive amount of energy locally.
This storage ability is heavily used in the North East to toughen the grid in the winter where gas pipeline pressure drops due to heating demand.
As to oil, it is actually still used, albeit intermittently and then rarely [1] It is usually used in plants that are primarily non-oil burning. Again, the advantage is that oil is far easier to store than nat gas.
Note that, since oil has a lot more carbon than methane and since oil extraction, at least in the USA, is very energy intensive, oil contribution to GHG is far greater than it's 1% of the energy mix would suggest.
And its all in the margins where the EV bus gets charged.
... Because they're generally not, nearly anywhere. Oil power plants are, in general, rare today nearly everywhere in the world; natural gas really did a number on them. And dispatchable power plants are almost _never_ coal; the startup lead-time is too high (hours at least). Ignoring weird stuff like grid batteries and pumped storage plants, they're nearly always gas turbines.