> The main cost of operating a power plant is fuel, which costs you nothing if not used.
Power plants are major capital investments. That capital has opportunity costs when it's just sitting idle. (Add in maintenance and deprecation etc.)
To continue the discussion, we should have a look at the economics of peaker plants.
> Let's do some napkin math for my area: if you started such a company in 2008 and paid your doctors minimum wage to stand by and keep themselves trained, but not actually do any work, one such doctor would've cost you around 100k € until the start of the pandemic.
Duh. Just because you (or me) can't come up with a decent business plan in two minutes of thinking, doesn't mean none exists.
First of all, I doubt any sane plan would involve paying people to sit on their hands and do nothing.
I imagine, you'd pay people a basic retainer to stay ready, and probably pay for their refresher courses every so often.
For some people, paying for the initial education and refresher courses alone would be payment enough to stand-by (and then a fat bonus, if they are actually called into action).
Silly example: someone who otherwise works as a nanny or with kids in general might want to be able to boast that they are fully qualified as a nurse and receive regular training.
(Flight attendants also usually come with some basic medical training already. And they were rather underemployed during this pandemic. So they might be good people to approach about such a retainer scheme.)
Smarter people than me will probably come up with better business plans.
Eg you might want to differentiate candidates by how quickly they could jump in. Being ready with 24h notice is much more demanding, than being able to be ready within a month. But the latter would still be useful, because training medical personal from scratch takes longer.