In this study, the applicability and performance of an integrated solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) and compressed air energy storage (CAES) plant with and without carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in a load-following power production scenario is investigated. Ten different process configurations are simulated using a combination of Aspen Plus 2006.5 and MATLAB tools. It was found that the addition of CAES to an SOFC plant provided significant load-following capabilities with relatively small penalties to efficiencies (1.1%HHV) and levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) (0.08-0.3 cent kW(-1) h(-1)). The load-following capabilities of the CAES-enabled plants, as measured by proposed squared-error based metrics, were excellent and were not impacted by the addition of CCS. CCS-enabled configurations using SOFCs with and without CAES are able to reduce direct CO2 emissions to essentially zero. The introduction of a seasonal, partial power train shutdown schedule, while useful for maintenance and cleaning purposes, also reduces fuel consumption by 9.5% with very small penalties to the overall load-following performance of the SOFC/CAES plant. Although SOFCs are perhaps decades away from being implemented on the scale discussed in this study, the forward-looking energy conversion strategy proposed in this work shows promise for providing future carbon-free peaking power. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.