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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 so

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).

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).