You can’t stabilize a grid with base load because you want to run base load plants at maximum capacity. Whereas peaker plants are quickly spun up and down to match up supply with demand.
To be clear, shutting down those nuclear plants is a bone-headed decision fueled by a false idea of greenness, but it has little to do with gas turbines. Nuclear replaces coal or hydro.
There's not much hydro where I'm wrong, so I might be mistaken with this. But I always thought hydro was also pretty flexible, so it could serve as peak load? Like, you can even pump water up a dam if you have a surplus of electricity.
only if you have two places where the water is stored, but pumped hydro is not the most common source of hydroelectric power in Europe.
Of course there is. What you're stabilizing is varying consumer demand, not the (quite long-term) shutdown of power stations.
Making an inherently and unfixably unreliable source your primary and then trying to fit everything around that is...unwise.
Yes you do. Even if all your generation is dispatch able, demand will still vary a lot.
First, it is only the demand that varies, not both supply and demand. Second, variations in demand are very predictable, unlike variations in supply by renewables (those aren't completely unpredictable, but highly so). Third, the magnitude is just not nearly the same.
For example, the cost for grid stability measures in Germany increased by more than an order of magnitude between 2011 and 2020.