Baseload Is a Myth (2024)
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Yet pumped hydro storage was originally implemented in the 70's because nuclear of the time couldn't do peaking power. It was envisioned as a way to move cheap nuclear power generation from the nighttime lows to daytime peaks.
Baseload is just a cost optimization. We need a power system that meeds demand 24/7/365. If we've done that then we've also provided baseload, by definition.
If nuclear power is trying to match a fluctuating load it needs storage for a day or two, to escape the Xenon dead time. But solar power for air-conditioning only needs an hour or two of storage to bridge from peak solar at noon, to maximum demand mid-afternoon.
On the other hand I live in Scotland. Solar power for space heating needs to save the summer sun for six months to heat homes in January. Ouch! Adding a day or two of storage to a nuclear power plant is much more practical.
Nuclear is prone to similar issues - statutory outages for inspections and refuelling, and emergency outages which often affect multiple plants at the same time (eg. a cracked steam valve in one plant requiring remediation on the same component in the others).
Keeping existing gas generators around, ready to be put into use when needed, is the simplest way of dealing with this until sufficient storage capacity is built out.
So it’s more of an issue when you want to use that excess solar to power your computer in winter.
If not nuclear, I think the northern regions need to focus on geothermal (Quaise?) and trash burning (yes, recycle first, but eventually everything non metal degrades and should be incinerated)
Technically, what grids mostly need now that we have a lot of intermittent producers and consumers of energy is not a lot of very inflexible generation (which is what baseload boils down to) but a lot of flexibility in the grid that can be switched on/off and is able to rapidly adapt to changing supply and demand.
The grid doesn't need gas plants that are running 24x7 and burn a lot of expensive gas when there's more than enough power being generated through the day from wind and solar, which tends to be a lot cheaper.
But because that's intermittent, you still need other sources of power. The traditional interpretation of that is "baseload" i.e. the stuff that used to provide most of our power (coal, nuclear, and gas).
But in the last few years we have a new alternative: batteries. This grew from next to nothing a few years ago to hundreds of GW of capacity. Soon TWs. Batteries can smooth out the peaks and dips and switch from charging to discharging in a few milliseconds. You might still need some other power beyond that but now you can carefully plan when to bring backup power online and take it offline again once it is no longer needed.
Modern gas plants can switch on and off relatively quickly and are very suitable for providing tha backup power. Modern coal and nuclear plants can do that as well but are just a lot less attractive due to their higher cost. And if you are not utilizing backup plants most of the time, their cost is really important.
Power that is 1) very expensive, and 2) can't be switched off easily or cheaply, is kind of a the opposite of what is needed. That's what baseload amounts to. It's the exact opposite of what is needed.
A thing that's often overlooked in discussions like this is cables. Cables can move power around. And interconnected grids like the European or Chinese grids make use of that to deal with highly localized peaks and dips in energy due to weather and daily and seasonal changes in availability of e.g. sunlight. An east west cable can time shift power in early morning and late evening. A north south cable can move solar power from places close to the equator to places further away from it. There are some cable projects being planned to connect Africa to Europe, Australia to Singapore, and Canada to Europe. Cables + batteries deflate a lot of the economical argument for needing baseload.
> The gap in understanding comes with the second factor: belief that it is inherently more efficient to match this load with big thermal generation.
> This comes from a historical contingency, where large stable loads matched very well with traditional coal-fired and nuclear power plants. These burn coal (or fission) to heat water, creating steam that then drives a turbine to generate electricity.
> In both cases, getting the water up to temperature can take hours, and these plants do not handle fluctuations in demand well. They are much more efficient running steadily at a given rate. But, when operated at that steady rate, these large plants were historically some of the most cost effective available.
> As a result, in most places a layered system of generators was built with large, slow-but-efficient coal and nuclear plants designed to serve the ‘baseload’ that would always be required. On top of this, faster-but-more-expensive gas, oil, and hydroelectric generators were layered.
This model doesn't make sense. Suppose you have an existing setup with some coal plants and some oil plants. The coal plants like to stay on; the oil plants are more indifferent.
There's a baseline load reflecting the amount of power demanded at almost all times of the day or night in whatever region contains this setup.
Now we add some more coal plants. They like to stay on. They hate turning off.
What will happen is that the local baseline load rises to accommodate the greater supply of power. Also, the price of electricity will go down.
It just isn't the case that the amount of power people consume within any given region is independent of the power supply to that region! The baseload is set by the amount of power being delivered; it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload". Almost any level will.
Lots of folks don't know that coal and gas fired plants are able to turn down their power generation more than 90% (i.e., "ten to one turn down"). It's definitely true that cold restarts take a while. However, they often rather quickly and dramatically change their power output profile while running.
I don't doubt there's a small number of plants that can't do 10-1. That said, transmitters are intended to be replaced and upgraded regularly since they have a finite lifespan (they're cheap anyhow). 10-1 has been around for 35+ years now and you're really lucky to get 20 years out of a transmitter.
I know of one factory that has their own coal power plant. The boiler is from the 1880s, the generator installed in the 1920s. It is horribly inefficient by any reasonable standard and takes hours to turn on. However because they keep it operational the power company gives them a massive discount on electric. About ever 5 years there is a major event and the power company has them turn it on for a few days and they power the entire town.
A transmitter is a sensor in a power plant that very precisely measures the air flow within the combustion chamber, so the fuel burns as clean/efficiently as possible. Relatively new transmitters can read with more precision, so you can dial down the airflow/fuel and the corresponding power output.
Maybe. Electric companies used to have policies that encouraged that. Most people are asleep between midnight and 6am, so if you used a lot of electric at that time they would give you a large discount on electric costs. However most people would not get up at 3am to take shower even if it would save $20/month (must be a really high flow shower to save that much). However those policies have changed over time as now the electric company is going to give discounts if you can use power when the sun is bright or the wind blowing (depending on where they get their power).
Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.
Base load was a useful concept in the 1960s when the cheapest power plants couldn't follow load and so you needed to find the right mix between base load and the more expensive generation. Now that the old power plants are not the cheapest we don't care about it even though it statistically still exists.
The strategy would be to have economical, non-intermittent generation. It would be non-intermittent supply because that part of demand is non-intermittent.
With or without externalities like climate change costed in?
Even other plants built in the same timeframe as Chernobyl are safer (not even getting to newer designs/builds), because in the West they were built with containment.
The founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank isn't anti-nuclear:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
In the 90's/00's when Germany and Denmark decided to start decarbonizing their grid, the sane choice would have been nuclear. At the time it was the cheapest zero carbon viable electricity source. (Geothermal may have been cheaper at the time, but wasn't viable to power their entire grid).
But instead they decided to massively overpay for wind & solar. This bootstrapped the insane cost reduction we've seen in wind & solar over the last 30 years. Today solar & wind are significantly cheaper than natural gas, and orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.
> coal (see Germany)
Which dropped from 55% of electricity from coal in 1990 to 23% today. From 400 million tons to 130 tons.
And how much lower would have it been if they had chosen to keep their existing nuclear and reduce/retire their coal and/or gas? Certainly if they did not want to build new nuclear that's one thing, but they chose to keep the emitting stuff, which was really stupid IMHO.
Even now it'd be viable to re-start some of Germany's nuclear if they really wanted to reduce emissions:
* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...
* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...
Germany coal is not estimated to be eliminated for another 5-6 years:
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-coal-exit-quie...
How many gigawatts of coal generation could have been shutdown already if nuclear was still generating its gigawatts?
Renewables in isolation have an entrenching effect on other aspects of our global emissions footprint & some likely causes of WW3. Humanity has an energy and greenhouse gas crisis, not an electrical generation crisis. Transportation fuels are central. Delaying our high energy future results in, among many other things, intensely polluting data centres instead of the obvious pairing of 24/7 large scale steady energy with no emissions to our increasingly digitally dictated economies.
Wind/wave/solar is nice, cheap enough anything pays for itself, but there is a bigger picture. Tribalism and anti-nuclear sentiment are not in line with our short to medium term environmental goals and are only marginally relevant to the long term and existential ones. We have already cursed generations by our trepidation, reluctance, and submission to monied interests. We cannot get an iPhone 20 without building and iterating on 19 models first.
And 3 is definitely not enough to provide any sort of cost scaling benefits.
> Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
Honestly a pretty shocking policy decision from the German government, and I imagine was entirely ideological rather than pragmatic.
Turning off nuclear power plants while you still are burning coal does not meet the criteria for a crime against humanity, but that decision has resulted in the death of many people already. Those that supported this decision are responsible for those deaths and for that contribution to future deaths caused by climate change.
>...Today solar & wind are significantly cheaper than natural gas, and orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.
Solar is not "orders of magnitude" cheaper than nuclear. Utility solar cost is somewhat comparable to older nuclear power plants that are already running and much cheaper than new nuclear. Rooftop solar is much more expensive than older nuclear power plants that are already running and comparable to the price of new nuclear.
I can expect that a well-built nuclear plant might not have a catastrophe in my lifetime. But when the consequences are so long-lasting it seems prudent to avoid them entirely. One misbuilt reactor or one governmental regime that rolls back safety regulations and you end up with irreversible consequences. Given the tendency of corporations to “race to the bottom” and abandon safety, and the general unwillingness of the US Government to give proper attention to potential catastrophes (like climate change), I don’t believe that we as a society can handle the responsibility of nuclear reactors. I wish we could have nuclear safely; I don’t trust us to be safe, so I’d rather we not have nuclear at all.
Of course, yes, wind and solar are great. But despite the amazing growth in those sources, we're still burning a huge amount of coal and oil.
Batteries can react fast enough to peaks and troughs in voltage load, so long as there are enough of them where needed. Grid-forming batteries can react to frequency fluctuations electronically.
Flywheels are another approach for grid stabilisation without a baseload.