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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced.

That's why all modern (aka the last 40-50 years or so) nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

This way you don't need to ridiculously overbuild solar and wind, and you have a better guarantee for power supply. Especially in colder climates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640358

> Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further

So, at best 20 hours of power supply from storage?

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> nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute

This is not a technical problem, but nuclear plants already struggle to compete on cost of energy when running 24/7.

Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.

They actually do not. Struggle, that is.

But yes, it absolutely makes more sense to run those plants 24/7 at 100% capacity.

And we have base-load that matches this reliable generating capacity very well.

The 40%-60% base load absolutely should be provided by nuclear if you don't have hydro (and even if you have hydro, some nuclear still makes sense).

The remainder should almost certainly be a mix: some more reliable nuclear, some storage, some wind, some solar.

That's not how electricity markets operate. Say you have 100GW demand (number are not in any way related to reality) and your Nuclear plant has a capacity of 50 GW. However it's a sunny day and solar is producing 80 GW. That solar will be producing at a much lower price, so no one is interested in buying that extra expensive 30 GW from the Nuclear plant (I'm glancing a bit over how pricing works exactly, but it comes to the same thing).

So either you restrict the amount of solar that can be produced or you subsidize the Nuclear prices. Both solutions are increasing prices for idiological reasons. If we do that might as well invest in solutions that are on exponential trajectories, like solar and battery.

The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman. Both intermittent (like solar and wind) and constant output (like Nuclear) are baseload technologies, despite working very differently. Both require over provisioning, on demand sources or storage. It does not make any sense to bet on a solution that despite significant subsidise over almost 70 years has failed to produce any exponential count reduction, if the other solution is on an exponential curve right now.

> The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman.

Didn't know that the requirement for electricity to always be available despite weather conditions is a strawman

That is an obviously mis-designed "market" as it only prices in marginal costs. This worked when most if not all producers actually were reliable. It doesn't work when you have a high share of intermittents.

For mis-designed electricity markets, see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...

It can be fixed easily by giving priority to reliable producers and only allowing intermittent producers in once the reliable producers are used up.

> The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman

No. It is actually essential, because intermittent renewables cannot reliably supply electricity, yet we need reliable electricity supply.

Intermittents are not baseload technology, because they cannot reliably supply electricity when needed.

> when running 24/7.

Key word: running 24/7. Which neither solar nor wind can do.

> Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.

Is that why countries that boast "we have so much renewable energy now" tend to import electricity from stable sources (nuclear and hydro) the moment there's a long period of overcast skies with little to no wind?

Germany is notorious for that https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

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