in a competitive market where a single price defines the incentive for all participants to produce or to consume electricity in a symmetric fashion the impacts of variable renewables on the level and volatility of price would indeed only reflect the realities of a changing market consumers and distributors would need to decide how to cope with intermittent supply from renewablesonly providers and those providers would have to consider whether the intermittent nature of their technologies was competitive against traditional power generation by dispatchable technologies such as nuclear coal and gas however as has been pointed out above variable renewables do not face the same incentives as other technologies such asymmetric treatment isolates variable renewables from the impacts they themselves inflict on the market price which affects only technologies not benefiting from such feedin tariffs