The ironic part is that baseload is usually brought up by nuclear proponents along with comments about storage not being able to fill in the gaps.
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.
I think the lede is a bit buried here. The key point is that when renewables levelized cost is cheaper than the marginal cost of other sources (and I'll add, particularly when its below the fuel-only cost) the ability to economically displace those other sources is extremely strong.
Discussions about baseload are meaningless unless you can articulate how much of it we're talking about (in gw, gwh, and $). Most discussions about this topic completely skip over that.
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.
One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.
This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good.
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.
> 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:
Ok, but if they had instead bootstrapped industrial nuclear technology into our known design-space we’d have actionable scalable solutions to transportation fuel generation (OPECs geopolitical sway, Chinese economic stability), mass desalination, environmentally friendly electrification of industrial processes, and industrial heat applications that could save incredible amounts of greenhouse emissions on a yearly basis. Instead we are reliving the oil dynamics of the 70s because of our poor industrial accounting, doubling down on emissions heavy tech in energy intensive operations, and maintaining harmful environmental chemical pollutants in our processes farmed out to the developing world…
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.
But had they invested in nuclear perhaps coal would be down to 0% today, and the same cost reduction would have applied to nuclear instead, with nuclear being orders of magnitude cheaper?
You are not alone. There are a lot of people who have been confused since the 1970s. Even people who don't care about the environment have long recognized that hypocrisy.
I think a lot of it was driven by the Chernobyl disaster, which was a massive environmental and health catastrophe. But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.
> But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.
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:
The environmentalist hatred for nukes long predates Chernobyl (if anything Chernobyl was an environmental boon by driving humans out of the zone). It started as a justified disapproval of nuclear tests (especially open air) and military nuclear, but then nuclear militaries made sone pointed remarks about the health and safety of a few beatniks going against the military-industrial complex, oil companies started fl funding groups, and voila civilian nukes are an environmental problem.
I have this stance. It’s, for me, a tail-risk calculation: For a given nuclear power plant to be more environmentally friendly than equivalent coal, you have to price in the probability of a nuclear catastrophe with the fact that such catastrophes create fallout that can outlast human civilization.
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.
The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb.
Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.
The article concedes that there is a minimum power consumption. Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
> Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
The strategy would be to have economical, non-intermittent generation. It would be non-intermittent supply because that part of demand is non-intermittent.
That strategy makes no sense when dispatchable power generation is cheaper than non-intermittent generation. This happened about 20 years ago when natgas became cheaper than coal.
Base load is real by statistics. However it is otherwise a useless concept. People talking about base load are universally wrong - wind and solar work just fine even if they can't provide the base load they are talking about: because we don't need base load in the way they think we do.
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.
> This part is still true, a meaningful amount of load is always required somewhere on the grid.
> 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.
> it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload".
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.
That depends on the design. Gas fired plants typically can turn down that much. However many coal plants cannot. The older the design the less likely it can turn down far.
> What will happen is that the local baseline load rises to accommodate the greater supply of power
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).
This article is largely non-scientific propaganda. LCOE is a fake stat that is never used to actually calculate any cost at any point. And anytime you use variable generation, you need to keep a spinning reserve, otherwise you get a blackout like what happened in Spain. HN should be ashamed to post such an article full of misinformation and half-truths not based on how engineering actually works.
The ironic part is that baseload is usually brought up by nuclear proponents along with comments about storage not being able to fill in the gaps.
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.
Yeah, nuclear wants storage (or gas peakers) just as much as renewables do.
I think the lede is a bit buried here. The key point is that when renewables levelized cost is cheaper than the marginal cost of other sources (and I'll add, particularly when its below the fuel-only cost) the ability to economically displace those other sources is extremely strong.
Discussions about baseload are meaningless unless you can articulate how much of it we're talking about (in gw, gwh, and $). Most discussions about this topic completely skip over that.
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.
Are your lights on? Mine are. In case you didn't know about my "phantom load".
One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.
This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good.
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.
> 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...
None? In 1990 those power plants were online and yet 55% of electricity was from coal.
Ok, but if they had instead bootstrapped industrial nuclear technology into our known design-space we’d have actionable scalable solutions to transportation fuel generation (OPECs geopolitical sway, Chinese economic stability), mass desalination, environmentally friendly electrification of industrial processes, and industrial heat applications that could save incredible amounts of greenhouse emissions on a yearly basis. Instead we are reliving the oil dynamics of the 70s because of our poor industrial accounting, doubling down on emissions heavy tech in energy intensive operations, and maintaining harmful environmental chemical pollutants in our processes farmed out to the developing world…
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.
So, nuclear powered trucks are the solution?
But had they invested in nuclear perhaps coal would be down to 0% today, and the same cost reduction would have applied to nuclear instead, with nuclear being orders of magnitude cheaper?
If they had invested in nuclear in 2000, they'd have maybe 3 plants built by now.
You are not alone. There are a lot of people who have been confused since the 1970s. Even people who don't care about the environment have long recognized that hypocrisy.
I think a lot of it was driven by the Chernobyl disaster, which was a massive environmental and health catastrophe. But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.
> But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.
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-...
The environmentalist hatred for nukes long predates Chernobyl (if anything Chernobyl was an environmental boon by driving humans out of the zone). It started as a justified disapproval of nuclear tests (especially open air) and military nuclear, but then nuclear militaries made sone pointed remarks about the health and safety of a few beatniks going against the military-industrial complex, oil companies started fl funding groups, and voila civilian nukes are an environmental problem.
I have this stance. It’s, for me, a tail-risk calculation: For a given nuclear power plant to be more environmentally friendly than equivalent coal, you have to price in the probability of a nuclear catastrophe with the fact that such catastrophes create fallout that can outlast human civilization.
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.
Environmental disasters that will likely outlast human civilization? Coal does that in normal operation.
It’s not an either-or.
...because they have other goals beyond reduce carbon emissions.
The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb.
Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.
The article concedes that there is a minimum power consumption. Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
> Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
The strategy would be to have economical, non-intermittent generation. It would be non-intermittent supply because that part of demand is non-intermittent.
That strategy makes no sense when dispatchable power generation is cheaper than non-intermittent generation. This happened about 20 years ago when natgas became cheaper than coal.
> This happened about 20 years ago when natgas became cheaper than coal.
With or without externalities like climate change costed in?
Base load is real by statistics. However it is otherwise a useless concept. People talking about base load are universally wrong - wind and solar work just fine even if they can't provide the base load they are talking about: because we don't need base load in the way they think we do.
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.
> This part is still true, a meaningful amount of load is always required somewhere on the grid.
> 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.
> it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload".
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.
That depends on the design. Gas fired plants typically can turn down that much. However many coal plants cannot. The older the design the less likely it can turn down far.
> What will happen is that the local baseline load rises to accommodate the greater supply of power
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).
This article is largely non-scientific propaganda. LCOE is a fake stat that is never used to actually calculate any cost at any point. And anytime you use variable generation, you need to keep a spinning reserve, otherwise you get a blackout like what happened in Spain. HN should be ashamed to post such an article full of misinformation and half-truths not based on how engineering actually works.