3 ms·
There are plenty of coal plants that absolutely can not ramp up and down in less than many hours, and will lose money as they do so. There are also many nuclea
by jhayward 9y ago
There are plenty of coal plants that absolutely can not ramp up and down in less than many hours, and will lose money as they do so.
There are also many nuclear plants perfectly capable of "load following", responding in the time frame of minutes to 10's of minutes to load changes.
- Reason077 9y agoMy understanding is that while load following is possible in nuclear plants, there are significant design, efficiency, and cost compromises involved. For these reasons, load-following nuclear is fairly rare. In the UK, all of our nuclear power plants operate at their design capacity all the time. Their output only changes during scheduled periods when they are shut down for maintenance, refuelling, etc. In contrast, all of the remaining coal-fired power plants in the UK effectively operate as load-following reserve. They ramp up only on cold winter days when demand is high and when wind generation is low. There are now many "coal free" days in the warmer months where there is no coal-fired power generation in the UK at all (it looks like today will be one of them!)