As load following for wind? Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer not

As load following for wind? Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult. Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return. So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two. *(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_reduction_for_Combined_Cycle_Power_Plants.pdf https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)