3 ms·

I don't really agree with this, though I come to the same conclusion via a different route. Baseload as an abstract concept still makes perfect sense. It is e

I don't really agree with this, though I come to the same conclusion via a different route. Baseload as an abstract concept still makes perfect sense. It is exactly equivalent to a flat reduction in demand. Which is something that would be worth paying for. How much it is worth is the big question. I'd suggest it is worth less than the costs of burning coal or gas as baseload and that therefore those should be used only when necessary and be on standby the rest of the time. I'd also suggest building new nuclear makes little sense as there's little chance of it being economically worthwhile. But, current nuclear that's not got other problems isn't any big drama to integrate with increasing renewables. And I don't think we're quite at the point yet where new build renewables are cheaper than nuclear running costs. If anything it just gets you faster to the point where you have a daily bump of excess solar that can be matched with batteries (grid support or in vehicles). Final shout-out for east-west orientated static solar, which can be used to make the solar curve a bit more of a square wave. They produce less but at times of day when it'll be worth more, once the standard peak is saturated.

flir 3y ago
Idle question, following on from your last para: Why aren't sun-tracking solar panels in use at scale? Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs, increased maintentance costs, or just because they won't add much extra output?
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs Economically infeasible because of decreased hardware costs. Panels are so cheap compared to tracking systems. (Quick envelope calculation: Amazon offered me a 400w panel for £200. Amortize that to about 6h of effective daytime use, that's 21600 seconds or 8kWh/day. 25 year warranty lifetime; derate that by, say, 20% to allow for degradation. 20 years is about 7300 days. That's about 58,400kWh. UK electric costs are all over the place at the moment, but at £0.30 that means .. you're buying £17,520 of electricity for £200.) NOT INCLUDING BALANCE OF SYSTEM COSTS, solar panels are really cheap.
  - flir 3y ago
    So if you want to generate more energy, "buy more land" is cheaper than "add tracking"? Seems like a solid answer, thanks.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      More (cheap desert) land, more roofspace, more air above parking lots. It's also a matter of reliability, cheap moving parts = downtime.
    - Tuna-Fish 3y ago
      Tracking does not significantly increase the amount of available energy out of a plot of land. It just reduces the amount of PV panels you need to efficiently utilize it. If you tile land with horizontal PV, all photons that hit that land hit them. And once PV is cheap enough, the expense of tracking (and especially the maintenance expense of tracking!) to deploy a little less silicon does not make any sense.
      - Gwypaas 3y ago
        https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/a-100mw-solar-farm-in-texas-will-mount-panels-directly-on-the-ground https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/a-100mw-solar-far...
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      I think a while back solar panels got cheaper than the curved mirrors used in molten solar based solar thermal plants. 'Cheap lower efficiency solar cells' became uneconomic when the non silicon cost of the panels became too high a proportion of the total cost. Because half the power per panel at 2/3rd the cost per panel doesn't pencil out.
  - viernullvier 3y ago
    Your calculation is way off. Getting 8kWh a day from a single 400Wp panel would already require 20 hours of operation at theoretical peak power, so under real-life conditions you can only expect a fraction of that per day. This doesn't invalidate your point though - even if you're one order of magnitude off, your £200 solar panel will buy you about ten times its price worth of electricity.
- yetanotherloss 3y ago
  Trackers are used at scale but it depends where. If a solar plant isn't intended to maximize output because peak prices can be negative, then there isn't much point. However at locations where something other than price is a driving factor, trackers are common enough at grid-scale facilities. The energy market systems are somewhat distorting perceptions of power in general and some reliability planners are worried that as older dispatchable generation goes offline for good, rotating blackouts may be in the future for many high demand areas.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The tracking hardware is expensive both in terms of initial outlay and maintenance, relative to the increase in output (which is significant: ~30% or so), when compared with the cost of just adding more panel area. Tracking is useful if you are constrained by the area of panels you have or the area you have to put the panels, but if you are constrained by neither and just optimising for price they lose to just building more fixed panels (in fact, with the rate at which panels are getting cheaper there's even a bit of a push towards not even bothering with building the mounts to orient the panels in the best fixed orientation and just putting them flat on the ground).
DamonHD 3y ago
Baseload only exists because we let it - partly we created it to soak up the outputs of previous generations of nuclear! BTW, agreed on E- and W- facing PV widening generation and thus being more useful.
- Incipient 3y ago
  There are plenty of 24h demands. Office/Street lighting, industry, etc. Baseload is just a product of certain demand.
  - cagenut 3y ago
    lighting is by definition not a 24h demand, why are you running your street lights during the day?
    - ohgodplsno 3y ago
      It is absolutely a 24h demand for cases like warehouses, hangars, factories: these cannot rely on daylight alone, and account for most of the energy consumption related to lighting.
dale_glass 3y ago
Baseload as an abstract concept makes sense. But the concept of a specific type of power plant that specializes in satisfying the baseload is going away. The idea that you provide the baseload with dirt cheap but inflexible nuclear and supplement the peaks with expensive but flexible things like coal made perfect sense, while nuclear was cheap. Now nuclear isn't the cheapest thing around anymore. Which means that while solar is available the economically rational decision is to buy solar. And this hurts the profitability of nuclear enormously. Now it can't run 24/7, because during the day it has competition. And since nuclear is almost all capital costs, any time it's not providing power is time it's not paying off those enormous loans. And renewables being very variable results in an environment nuclear isn't very well suited for either.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > Now nuclear isn't the cheapest thing around anymore. Which means that while solar is available the economically rational decision is to buy solar. You are emphasizing one factor/capability: (economic) efficiency. That may not be the only factor worth considering. One such other factor could be reliability, and it may be worth paying more to gain that factor/capability. Or would you also say: "Well, the load can be handled by a single server (or router), so a second (active-active or active-passive) system isn't worth paying for to get HA."?
  - pjc50 3y ago
    In a capitalist system of electricity markets, things which are valuable have to be turned into prices to make them happen. (France's big nuclear build out was extremely socialist planned economy, only later privatized as EDF)
    - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
      EDF is a state company owned by French state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc... For ones too lazy to open the Wikipedia page, it was state owned since its inception. Founded 1946; 77 years ago Founder French state under the direction of Provisional Government Minister for Industrial Production Marcel Paul
rcxdude 3y ago
Yes, I think it's important to say both that the idea of splitting up the demand curve into baseload and variable demand is a reasonable way to look at things when given a certain mix of generation options, but also that it is not some fundamental reality about how the grid needs to operate in the same way that supply and demand always matching up is.

flir 3y ago

Idle question, following on from your last para: Why aren't sun-tracking solar panels in use at scale? Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs, increased maintentance costs, or just because they won't add much extra output?

pjc50 3y ago
> Economically infeasible I assume, but is that because of increased hardware costs Economically infeasible because of decreased hardware costs. Panels are so cheap compared to tracking systems. (Quick envelope calculation: Amazon offered me a 400w panel for £200. Amortize that to about 6h of effective daytime use, that's 21600 seconds or 8kWh/day. 25 year warranty lifetime; derate that by, say, 20% to allow for degradation. 20 years is about 7300 days. That's about 58,400kWh. UK electric costs are all over the place at the moment, but at £0.30 that means .. you're buying £17,520 of electricity for £200.) NOT INCLUDING BALANCE OF SYSTEM COSTS, solar panels are really cheap.
- flir 3y ago
  So if you want to generate more energy, "buy more land" is cheaper than "add tracking"? Seems like a solid answer, thanks.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    More (cheap desert) land, more roofspace, more air above parking lots. It's also a matter of reliability, cheap moving parts = downtime.
  - Tuna-Fish 3y ago
    Tracking does not significantly increase the amount of available energy out of a plot of land. It just reduces the amount of PV panels you need to efficiently utilize it. If you tile land with horizontal PV, all photons that hit that land hit them. And once PV is cheap enough, the expense of tracking (and especially the maintenance expense of tracking!) to deploy a little less silicon does not make any sense.
    - Gwypaas 3y ago
      https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/a-100mw-solar-farm-in-texas-will-mount-panels-directly-on-the-ground https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/a-100mw-solar-far...
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    I think a while back solar panels got cheaper than the curved mirrors used in molten solar based solar thermal plants. 'Cheap lower efficiency solar cells' became uneconomic when the non silicon cost of the panels became too high a proportion of the total cost. Because half the power per panel at 2/3rd the cost per panel doesn't pencil out.
- viernullvier 3y ago
  Your calculation is way off. Getting 8kWh a day from a single 400Wp panel would already require 20 hours of operation at theoretical peak power, so under real-life conditions you can only expect a fraction of that per day. This doesn't invalidate your point though - even if you're one order of magnitude off, your £200 solar panel will buy you about ten times its price worth of electricity.
yetanotherloss 3y ago
Trackers are used at scale but it depends where. If a solar plant isn't intended to maximize output because peak prices can be negative, then there isn't much point. However at locations where something other than price is a driving factor, trackers are common enough at grid-scale facilities. The energy market systems are somewhat distorting perceptions of power in general and some reliability planners are worried that as older dispatchable generation goes offline for good, rotating blackouts may be in the future for many high demand areas.
rcxdude 3y ago
The tracking hardware is expensive both in terms of initial outlay and maintenance, relative to the increase in output (which is significant: ~30% or so), when compared with the cost of just adding more panel area. Tracking is useful if you are constrained by the area of panels you have or the area you have to put the panels, but if you are constrained by neither and just optimising for price they lose to just building more fixed panels (in fact, with the rate at which panels are getting cheaper there's even a bit of a push towards not even bothering with building the mounts to orient the panels in the best fixed orientation and just putting them flat on the ground).

DamonHD 3y ago

Baseload only exists because we let it - partly we created it to soak up the outputs of previous generations of nuclear! BTW, agreed on E- and W- facing PV widening generation and thus being more useful.

Incipient 3y ago
There are plenty of 24h demands. Office/Street lighting, industry, etc. Baseload is just a product of certain demand.
- cagenut 3y ago
  lighting is by definition not a 24h demand, why are you running your street lights during the day?
  - ohgodplsno 3y ago
    It is absolutely a 24h demand for cases like warehouses, hangars, factories: these cannot rely on daylight alone, and account for most of the energy consumption related to lighting.

dale_glass 3y ago

Baseload as an abstract concept makes sense. But the concept of a specific type of power plant that specializes in satisfying the baseload is going away. The idea that you provide the baseload with dirt cheap but inflexible nuclear and supplement the peaks with expensive but flexible things like coal made perfect sense, while nuclear was cheap. Now nuclear isn't the cheapest thing around anymore. Which means that while solar is available the economically rational decision is to buy solar. And this hurts the profitability of nuclear enormously. Now it can't run 24/7, because during the day it has competition. And since nuclear is almost all capital costs, any time it's not providing power is time it's not paying off those enormous loans. And renewables being very variable results in an environment nuclear isn't very well suited for either.

throw0101b 3y ago
> Now nuclear isn't the cheapest thing around anymore. Which means that while solar is available the economically rational decision is to buy solar. You are emphasizing one factor/capability: (economic) efficiency. That may not be the only factor worth considering. One such other factor could be reliability, and it may be worth paying more to gain that factor/capability. Or would you also say: "Well, the load can be handled by a single server (or router), so a second (active-active or active-passive) system isn't worth paying for to get HA."?
- pjc50 3y ago
  In a capitalist system of electricity markets, things which are valuable have to be turned into prices to make them happen. (France's big nuclear build out was extremely socialist planned economy, only later privatized as EDF)
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    EDF is a state company owned by French state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc... For ones too lazy to open the Wikipedia page, it was state owned since its inception. Founded 1946; 77 years ago Founder French state under the direction of Provisional Government Minister for Industrial Production Marcel Paul

rcxdude 3y ago

Yes, I think it's important to say both that the idea of splitting up the demand curve into baseload and variable demand is a reasonable way to look at things when given a certain mix of generation options, but also that it is not some fundamental reality about how the grid needs to operate in the same way that supply and demand always matching up is.