5 ms·

> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often u

> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just because nuclear is inflexible? More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?

fallingknife 4y ago
I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary because there are many places where the cheapest power generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Baseload has several major ingredients: the required continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling, repairs and so on). The required baseload is then further influenced by load variability, and rate-of-change. Not all generation equipment can spin up / down equally fast, and sometimes the effect of for instance a shut-down is that it will take a long time to go back online. Baseload is a function of a whole interconnected grid rather than of some locality, and this is a big difference between how laypeople see this and how people in the power business see it. It's not as if the electrons that are pushed into a wire in say Southern France need to get all the way to Poland to light a bulb there, all that the various generators do is maintain their local grid by making available enough power locally that lightbulbs in France are served by their local power stations and lightbulbs in Poland are served by theirs. This minimizes transmission losses. If you have a surplus and the distance is large then with conventional (AC) transmission lines there is an upper limit to how big an area you can serve before the losses make that no longer economical. HVDC has nicer properties for long distance transmission which has some very interesting consequences for baseload: suddenly wind and solar thousands of KM (multiple timezones) away can be used to provide power to some locality, reducing the need for local generation capacity if the price is right. This revolution is happening right now, the HVDC grid interconnects are shaping up rapidly with more and more of these coming on-line. Especially the longer East-West runs have the possibility to materially affect the amount of fossil/nuclear required for when solar and wind are insufficient, as well as the North-South ones from areas where there is a lot of hydro generation capacity.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    (incidentally: if this stuff interests you take a guess at how far those electrons really move during 1/100th or 1/120th of a second and then check the physics to see how far they really travel, the answer may surprise you).
Paradigma11 4y ago
Use Case: You pay more to get a reliable service for the same price regardless of weather conditions.
- baud147258 4y ago
  well, nuclear power plants can be impacted by weather conditions: specifically those which use rivers to provide the water for their cooling need, rivers whose discharge can be impacted by high heat, bringing it to a level below what's required for the nuclear plant. I don't think it's not a common occurrence, but it can happen
  - Paradigma11 4y ago
    Is this really a fundamental problem or were those plants just not designed with a warming climate in mind?
orangeoxidation 4y ago
Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load". Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load. We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or batteries. With renewables the production capacity is variable as well. To fill possible "holes" in it we don't need more base load. What renewables need are ... peaker plants. A role nuclear reactors are exceptionally unsuited to fill.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load. That's not exactly true, you can build nuclear plants for load following which provides some amount of flexibility, at the cost of some efficiency (about 1% I think). IIRC French plants can operate between 30 and 100% rated power, and ramp rates can reach 5% per minute (though normal rates are 1 to 3). French nukes regularly have to ramp up and down quickly to compensate for wind variation and monday pickup (electricity consumptions goes way down over the weekend, especially nice spring weekends, then back way up on week start).
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The less they produce, the higher is the cost of each kWh. But they are already not competitive at 100%.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      Ah yes, the “heads I win, tails you lose” gambit, thank you for your very useful contributions. Do carefully avoid looking at french electricity prices and compare them to germany’s too.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
necheffa 4y ago
The technology to do load follow at a nuclear plant exists. If you think about it, "base load" has nothing to do with the power source. Given some period of time, say a day, you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load. As the grid becomes more distributed and therefore less centralized, you are going to see base load hitting lower peaks because individual power generation stations will have less aggregate demand. But until society reaches a point where at least part of the day there is zero demand on the grid (fat chance) you will always have base load in some shape or form.
- logifail 4y ago
  > you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load. If it's - say - sunny and windy, your renewables are always going to undercut all other generators. So when they undercut nuclear, basic market forces should mean nuclear doesn't get to supply a single MW, and if that means investors lose out, well, tough. Base load should always be supplied by the cheapest supplier. Not the least flexible and/or the ones with the highest fixed costs.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 4y ago
> More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades? The use case is that there should be enough capacity under governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades) the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen should freeze in winter because the forces of the market deem it more profitable to have some large company buy their way out.
- logifail 4y ago
  > there should be enough capacity under governmental control [..] Q: You really want to nationalize power generation?
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Yes, why not? Full or partial public ownership of power plants, nation-scale grid and regional distribution companies is common here in Europe.

fallingknife 4y ago

I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary because there are many places where the cheapest power generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.

jacquesm 4y ago
Baseload has several major ingredients: the required continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling, repairs and so on). The required baseload is then further influenced by load variability, and rate-of-change. Not all generation equipment can spin up / down equally fast, and sometimes the effect of for instance a shut-down is that it will take a long time to go back online. Baseload is a function of a whole interconnected grid rather than of some locality, and this is a big difference between how laypeople see this and how people in the power business see it. It's not as if the electrons that are pushed into a wire in say Southern France need to get all the way to Poland to light a bulb there, all that the various generators do is maintain their local grid by making available enough power locally that lightbulbs in France are served by their local power stations and lightbulbs in Poland are served by theirs. This minimizes transmission losses. If you have a surplus and the distance is large then with conventional (AC) transmission lines there is an upper limit to how big an area you can serve before the losses make that no longer economical. HVDC has nicer properties for long distance transmission which has some very interesting consequences for baseload: suddenly wind and solar thousands of KM (multiple timezones) away can be used to provide power to some locality, reducing the need for local generation capacity if the price is right. This revolution is happening right now, the HVDC grid interconnects are shaping up rapidly with more and more of these coming on-line. Especially the longer East-West runs have the possibility to materially affect the amount of fossil/nuclear required for when solar and wind are insufficient, as well as the North-South ones from areas where there is a lot of hydro generation capacity.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  (incidentally: if this stuff interests you take a guess at how far those electrons really move during 1/100th or 1/120th of a second and then check the physics to see how far they really travel, the answer may surprise you).

Paradigma11 4y ago

Use Case: You pay more to get a reliable service for the same price regardless of weather conditions.

baud147258 4y ago
well, nuclear power plants can be impacted by weather conditions: specifically those which use rivers to provide the water for their cooling need, rivers whose discharge can be impacted by high heat, bringing it to a level below what's required for the nuclear plant. I don't think it's not a common occurrence, but it can happen
- Paradigma11 4y ago
  Is this really a fundamental problem or were those plants just not designed with a warming climate in mind?

orangeoxidation 4y ago

Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load". Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load. We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or batteries. With renewables the production capacity is variable as well. To fill possible "holes" in it we don't need more base load. What renewables need are ... peaker plants. A role nuclear reactors are exceptionally unsuited to fill.

masklinn 4y ago
> Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load. That's not exactly true, you can build nuclear plants for load following which provides some amount of flexibility, at the cost of some efficiency (about 1% I think). IIRC French plants can operate between 30 and 100% rated power, and ramp rates can reach 5% per minute (though normal rates are 1 to 3). French nukes regularly have to ramp up and down quickly to compensate for wind variation and monday pickup (electricity consumptions goes way down over the weekend, especially nice spring weekends, then back way up on week start).
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The less they produce, the higher is the cost of each kWh. But they are already not competitive at 100%.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Ah yes, the “heads I win, tails you lose” gambit, thank you for your very useful contributions. Do carefully avoid looking at french electricity prices and compare them to germany’s too.
    - ncmncm 4y ago

necheffa 4y ago

The technology to do load follow at a nuclear plant exists. If you think about it, "base load" has nothing to do with the power source. Given some period of time, say a day, you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load. As the grid becomes more distributed and therefore less centralized, you are going to see base load hitting lower peaks because individual power generation stations will have less aggregate demand. But until society reaches a point where at least part of the day there is zero demand on the grid (fat chance) you will always have base load in some shape or form.

logifail 4y ago
> you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load. If it's - say - sunny and windy, your renewables are always going to undercut all other generators. So when they undercut nuclear, basic market forces should mean nuclear doesn't get to supply a single MW, and if that means investors lose out, well, tough. Base load should always be supplied by the cheapest supplier. Not the least flexible and/or the ones with the highest fixed costs.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mschuster91 4y ago

> More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades? The use case is that there should be enough capacity under governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades) the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen should freeze in winter because the forces of the market deem it more profitable to have some large company buy their way out.

logifail 4y ago
> there should be enough capacity under governmental control [..] Q: You really want to nationalize power generation?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Yes, why not? Full or partial public ownership of power plants, nation-scale grid and regional distribution companies is common here in Europe.