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Baseload as an abstract concept makes sense.

But the concept of a specific type of power plant that specializes in satisfying the baseload is going away.

The idea that you provide the baseload with dirt cheap but inflexible nuclear and supplement the peaks with expensive but flexible things like coal made perfect sense, while nuclear was cheap.

Now nuclear isn't the cheapest thing around anymore. Which means that while solar is available the economically rational decision is to buy solar.

And this hurts the profitability of nuclear enormously. Now it can't run 24/7, because during the day it has competition. And since nuclear is almost all capital costs, any time it's not providing power is time it's not paying off those enormous loans. And renewables being very variable results in an environment nuclear isn't very well suited for either.

> Now nuclear isn't the cheapest thing around anymore. Which means that while solar is available the economically rational decision is to buy solar.

You are emphasizing one factor/capability: (economic) efficiency. That may not be the only factor worth considering. One such other factor could be reliability, and it may be worth paying more to gain that factor/capability.

Or would you also say: "Well, the load can be handled by a single server (or router), so a second (active-active or active-passive) system isn't worth paying for to get HA."?

In a capitalist system of electricity markets, things which are valuable have to be turned into prices to make them happen.

(France's big nuclear build out was extremely socialist planned economy, only later privatized as EDF)

EDF is a state company owned by French state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...

For ones too lazy to open the Wikipedia page, it was state owned since its inception.

Founded 1946; 77 years ago

Founder French state under the direction of Provisional Government Minister for Industrial Production Marcel Paul

Nationalized last week due to the hole they dug for themselves using nuclear power.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-giant...

> In a capitalist system of electricity markets, things which are valuable have to be turned into prices to make them happen.

Some things are mandated regardless of what they cost (reliability regulations, or lack thereof). Just ask Texas:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Groundhog_Day_blizzard#Te...

Another factor is the fact that they are working at night. And Europe is further to the north than California, nights has a tendency to get much longer in winter (up to 16 hours of night in Central Europe), so cheap energy from solar panels is instantly nullified by lack of sunshine during winter, when the energy is needed the most.

>(up to 16 hours of night in Central Europe)

Poland gets on average 1 hour of actual sunshine in December. I'll take nuclear power unless somebody really has reasonable strategy for getting 3-7 days of energy storage.

You need an energy storage solution for nuclear too, unless you want to heavily overbuild, which raises it from too expensive to stupid expensive.

And once you have that storage, a mix of renewables is cheaper.

> You need an energy storage solution for nuclear too, unless you want to heavily overbuild, which raises it from too expensive to stupid expensive.

Why do you energy storage for nuclear? As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where 8-9 GW of nuclear power chugs along continuously:

* https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

I'm not sure what needs to be stored. We just bring online hydro and gas as needed (along with having fluctuating wind).

Hydro and gas both involve storage (of water and methane), and both can be, and are, used with renewables and/or nuclear to fill gaps between supply and demand.

> You need an energy storage solution for nuclear too, unless you want to heavily overbuild, which raises it from too expensive to stupid expensive.

No, nuclear lowers baseline you need. If 50% of your energy is produced by nuclear, you just need to build the rest like your country is 50% smaller.

Reliability to most people is a property of the system, not of the power plant.

Meaning, I don't care whether the power I'm getting got made by a power plant that can keep going 24/7, or sometimes gets supplemented by a battery, or there's some constant delicate balancing act going on between 5000 distributed sources.

So as a consumer I don't really care that nuclear is stable and solar isn't, the output of the grid is all that matters.

Yes, I think it's important to say both that the idea of splitting up the demand curve into baseload and variable demand is a reasonable way to look at things when given a certain mix of generation options, but also that it is not some fundamental reality about how the grid needs to operate in the same way that supply and demand always matching up is.

Idle question, following on from your last para:

Why aren't sun-tracking solar panels in use at scale? Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs, increased maintentance costs, or just because they won't add much extra output?

> Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs

Economically infeasible because of decreased hardware costs. Panels are so cheap compared to tracking systems.

(Quick envelope calculation: Amazon offered me a 400w panel for £200. Amortize that to about 6h of effective daytime use, that's 21600 seconds or 8kWh/day. 25 year warranty lifetime; derate that by, say, 20% to allow for degradation. 20 years is about 7300 days. That's about 58,400kWh. UK electric costs are all over the place at the moment, but at £0.30 that means .. you're buying £17,520 of electricity for £200.)

NOT INCLUDING BALANCE OF SYSTEM COSTS, solar panels are really cheap.

So if you want to generate more energy, "buy more land" is cheaper than "add tracking"? Seems like a solid answer, thanks.

More (cheap desert) land, more roofspace, more air above parking lots. It's also a matter of reliability, cheap moving parts = downtime.

Tracking does not significantly increase the amount of available energy out of a plot of land. It just reduces the amount of PV panels you need to efficiently utilize it. If you tile land with horizontal PV, all photons that hit that land hit them.

And once PV is cheap enough, the expense of tracking (and especially the maintenance expense of tracking!) to deploy a little less silicon does not make any sense.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/a-100mw-solar-far...

I think a while back solar panels got cheaper than the curved mirrors used in molten solar based solar thermal plants.

'Cheap lower efficiency solar cells' became uneconomic when the non silicon cost of the panels became too high a proportion of the total cost. Because half the power per panel at 2/3rd the cost per panel doesn't pencil out.

Your calculation is way off. Getting 8kWh a day from a single 400Wp panel would already require 20 hours of operation at theoretical peak power, so under real-life conditions you can only expect a fraction of that per day.

This doesn't invalidate your point though - even if you're one order of magnitude off, your £200 solar panel will buy you about ten times its price worth of electricity.

Ugh, I did 1kWh = 1000 watt-seconds, which should be 3600 watt-seconds, so the calculations are off by a factor of four.

£0.30 per kWh is also optimistic over the lifetime of the panel.

Around these parts you get the spot price for any solar you generate. Prices can, and do, go negative.

In general prices tend to be low when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing.

So, you might even end up paying for the pleasure of providing solar power :)

I have 22 solar panels rated at 370w, I live in Phoenix Arizona where it’s normally cloud free and sunny. I have them facing southeast and southwest. My most productive panel produces about 2.5 KWh a day.

Not that I disagree with the conclusion, but you’d get no where near 8KWh a day from a 400W panel.

Trackers are used at scale but it depends where. If a solar plant isn't intended to maximize output because peak prices can be negative, then there isn't much point. However at locations where something other than price is a driving factor, trackers are common enough at grid-scale facilities.

The energy market systems are somewhat distorting perceptions of power in general and some reliability planners are worried that as older dispatchable generation goes offline for good, rotating blackouts may be in the future for many high demand areas.

The tracking hardware is expensive both in terms of initial outlay and maintenance, relative to the increase in output (which is significant: ~30% or so), when compared with the cost of just adding more panel area. Tracking is useful if you are constrained by the area of panels you have or the area you have to put the panels, but if you are constrained by neither and just optimising for price they lose to just building more fixed panels (in fact, with the rate at which panels are getting cheaper there's even a bit of a push towards not even bothering with building the mounts to orient the panels in the best fixed orientation and just putting them flat on the ground).

Baseload only exists because we let it - partly we created it to soak up the outputs of previous generations of nuclear!

BTW, agreed on E- and W- facing PV widening generation and thus being more useful.

There are plenty of 24h demands. Office/Street lighting, industry, etc.

Baseload is just a product of certain demand.

lighting is by definition not a 24h demand, why are you running your street lights during the day?

It is absolutely a 24h demand for cases like warehouses, hangars, factories: these cannot rely on daylight alone, and account for most of the energy consumption related to lighting.