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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

More renewables means the need for more base load? This is the first I’ve seen anybody say that.

Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.

* already is.

Copper prices are through the roof, and the usual copper players are seemingly unwilling to expand much

(Atleast in India)

Heating is one of the easiest to pair with intermittent power. Heat storage “batteries” can store energy for a very long time. Stockholm recently converted an old cave used to store oil, which now stores heat for a district heating network

Probably the assumption is that renewables replace a different base load like coal or gas powered plants.

Yeah, it's utter crap.

It shouldn’t be the first time, this is what natural gas peaker plants have been about for 20 years. Solar and wind can’t sync the grid, they require sync or the grid collapses. Sync (Hz) can only be provided by base load that quickly spin up or down to balance out the frequency of the grid

> Solar and wind can’t sync the grid

Grid-forming inverters, particularly with batteries, can totally do this job.

That explains why Ontario built natural gas plants alongside its wind/solar rollout.

That does not explain why Ontario needs more nuclear power generation some nebulous time in the future to support those same wind/solar installations per the original comment and parent reference.

It needs nuclear to avoid using gas. Ren will be curtailed anyway. May as well curtail them for nuclear. Germany is a prime example of fossils+ren combo https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

As a friendly reminder, we are talking about not just nuclear, but base load nuclear. The gas plants in Ontario are used as peaker plants and even if nuclear were to replace them in that role, as unlikely as that is, that would not see it operating as the base load we are talking about — that the earlier comment said Ontario needs more of because of wind/solar installations built over the past decade. Except that is exactly the role that nuclear plays in Ontario and is already sized appropriately to match anything needed from wind/solar.

Ontario anticipates that electricity usage will climb in the future and is working to build more capacity to accommodate future demand. There will be need for increased nuclear capacity to service that. However, it remains uncertain what that has to do with a wind or solar install from 10 years ago?

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