taxes and tradable permit systems that result in increasing costs over time can help smooth the transition whereas environmental regulations based on enforcing absolute standards at individual plant level can lead to economic dislocations for those plants some technologies such as the potential to retrofit endofpipe environmental cleanup technologies or the ability to switch to loweremitting fuels can help reduce the degree to which assets may become stranded by increasing the plant s flexibility to operate under different regulatory conditions some plants are also inherently more flexible than others for example some coalfired power generation plant may be more readily adapted than others to run with a fraction of biomass energy andor have carbon capture and storage plant retrofitted at a later date once the economics become favourable