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Base load. Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny? So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base l

Base load. Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny? So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point. The grid is really delicate. You need just the right amount of power to keep it at 50Hz. Too little, brownouts. Too much, overload. So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. :-) Almost more important than the power generation in many countries these days is the grid. With no grid, or a poor grid, or a grid that can’t store energy, you can build all the wind you want: but you can’t bring it online. > The median approval time to connect to the grid for a new US power project has climbed by 30-days/year since 2001; and has doubled since 2015, to over 1,000 days (almost 3-years) in 2021. Wind and solar projects are now taking longest to inter-connect, due to their prevalence, lower power quality and remoteness. https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-time-to-connect-to-the-grid/ https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-... > Around £200bn of renewables projects are facing waiting times of 15 years to come online, jeopardising plans to create a net-zero power grid by 2035. https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-risks-derailing-net-zero-power-grid-vision/ https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-r... > They have expressed concerns that wait times of up to 15 years have made it difficult to attract investment as the UK competes with the $369bn (£295bn) US package of climate subsidies. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connection-delays-low-carbon-projects-ofgem-energy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connec...

shinryuu 3y ago
Sweden has a large amount of hydropower as baseload though.
- samuell 3y ago
  The hydro power is located in the far north(west), meaning that there is a bottle-neck in the hundreds to thousands of km of transport lines needed to bring it to the big cities in the south. The capacity of these lines is simply not enough to supply the cities in the south with only hydro power base load, which is why Sweden had the four major nuclear power stations built in the south, in the vicinity of major urban areas. It was a really well thought out system, that has been degrading over the last years for political reasons.
jug 3y ago
> What if it’s not windy or sunny? Sweden is 528 000 km² and there is part a geographical spread even into sea which use to have weather patterns not following those at land, part complemented heavily by hydro, and part large battery parks already in use to complement wind. What kind of issues still remain after all these countermeasures? Still requiring countermeasures on the extremely costly scale of a massive nuclear expansion?
- jen729w 3y ago
  See my post, which I may have updated since you wrote this. Renewables, without massive grid storage to dampen their unreliability can not be the base load upon which your grid depends. This storage could exist, but we haven’t built it and it isn’t proven.
  - jug 3y ago
    It is absolutely built and proven in numerous countries and more are planned / under construction by Vattenfall alone. https://group.vattenfall.com/what-we-do/roadmap-to-fossil-freedom/battery-storage-systems https://group.vattenfall.com/what-we-do/roadmap-to-fossil-fr...
- kube-system 3y ago
  After doing all of that, your wind and solar are no longer cheap. The cheap numbers per kwh for wind/solar currently are under the assumption that you take the power when you get it.
  - jug 3y ago
    It doesn't matter if it's more expensive. The question if it eventually gets more expensive than nuclear, an energy form Sweden/Vattenfall recently turned away from because it was not financially feasible anymore.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      I've seen cited that the cheapest chemical battery storage is similar to the price of gas generation. If we're considering LCOE numbers, yes, that would be more expensive than nuclear then. Your local regulatory environment notwithstanding.
samuell 3y ago
Yea. You need to constantly produce the same amount of power that is being consumed, or you get a fall of the frequency in the system. Wind doesn't care about that. You don't need to look long at a graph showing the typical power production of wind vs something like nuclear over a day, to see that wind power is not only extremely unreliable. It also requires massive balancing measures from the other power types in the mix, which is sometimes easier said than done. You definitely want to let the wind power mostly "top up" the mix, and not constitute major parts of it, unless you have tons of something else to balance up the fluctuations with (related, nuclear is not great for balancing this, as it can't typically change output quickly, but is great as the base load, just as the parent comment says).
- jug 3y ago
  Speaking of topping up which I agree with, I think it bears saying here that today with unexpanded nuclear in Sweden, wind accounts for only about 20% of energy production. Or if only including renewable sources NOT including nuclear, wind still only accounts for about 30%.
  - bjourne 3y ago
    Nuclear power "only" accounts for 29% of total production. Wind and especially offshore wind has huge potential to expand, but the government has taken an obstructionist stance towards that mode of power production. It doesn't make sense cutting wind subsidies amounting to a few billion while guaranteeing 400 billion to nuclear investments.
    - samuell 3y ago
      There has already been challenges in balancing out the extreme fluctuations from wind with the current amount (leading to the need to start gas turbines which were meant for emergency power multiple times over the last few years, and even oil plants), and expanding it would only make this worse, as there would not be enough easily balancing power sources close by (hydro can be used to balance to some extent, but are hundreds to thousands of km away, with limited capacity in the extremely long power lines, meaning that it can't account for all of that).
kieranmaine 3y ago
> Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny? Battery storage can fill the gap. This blog post makes a good argument why battery storage and over provisioning of renewables could solve this problem - https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-batteries-will-win/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-b.... In addition it doesn't include dynamically controlling demand (for example not charging EVs when demand is high). > So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point. Sweden doesn't appear to use coal as baseload. The UK did, but managed to replace most of it with gas, wind, solar, reduced demand and increased imports (https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/historicaldata/ https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/historicaldata/).
- jen729w 3y ago
  > and increased imports From France, who has a shit-load of nuclear. :-)
  - kieranmaine 3y ago
    I'm for more nuclear (a decent amount is generated in the UK), but I think your statement: "So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point." doesn't take into the impact storage (both stationary and in the form of EVs) will have in the future.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > the impact storage (both stationary and in the form of EVs) will have in the future. Have you ever heard the expression "hope is not a plan"?
      - kieranmaine 3y ago
        I'm basing this on the huge increase in battery production. From https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-scale-battery-storage-additions-2017-2022 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s...: * Annual grid-scale battery storage additions went from 0.76 GW in 2016 to 11.21 GW in 2022. I couldn't find the GWh figures, but this is a fast ramp up. * "In September 2022, India released its draft National Electricity Plan, setting out ambitious targets for the development of battery energy storage, with an estimated capacity of between 51 to 84 GW installed by 2031-32." * "In December 2022, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency...announced funding support for a total of 2 GW/4.2 GWh of grid-scale storage capacity, equipped with grid-forming inverters to provide essential system services that are currently supplied by thermal power plants." From https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive...: * "Automotive lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery demand increased by about 65% to 550 GWh in 2022, from about 330 GWh in 2021" * "August 2022 and March 2023, major EV and battery makers announced cumulative post-IRA investments of at least USD 52 billion in North American EV supply chains – of which 50% is for battery manufacturing, and about 20% each for battery components and EV manufacturing." These pages also list the challenges faced, so I'm not assuming it's a smooth road ahead. However, the trend is clear. Hopefully, technological improvements will continue and drive down costs further (I have no knowledge if this will happen). I hope there's improvements in nuclear technology that allow for a faster, cheaper nuclear rollout and belief it has it's place. But to return to original comment I replied that states "we need something to replace coal...that thing can...only be nuclear at this point" dismisses the increases in investment and production of battery storage.
eesmith 3y ago
Sweden doesn't use coal to any appreciable degree. Hydro provides about 42%, nuclear 29%, wind 21%, thermal power 5.8%, and "unspecified" at 1.9%. (Thanks to HN user fifilura who pointed people to the dashboard at https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ a few months ago, showing the real-time data and breakdown.)
morsch 3y ago
> So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1]. This makes it a poor companion to renewables. [1] Except for the couple of weeks a year when it's down for maintenance, refueling, or its river's water has gotten too hot or there isn't enough of it, then the output is zero. Actually, it's negative because you need to provide it with energy or it self-destroys.
- samuell 3y ago
  Yes, you need a quicker power source to balance, and Sweden got that with the hydro power. The hydro power is not enough as base power for the large cities in the south, on the other hand, in part because in part the capacity is not enough, and in part because how the extremely long transport lines from the far north (where the hydro power is located) to the major cities in the south are a serious bottle-neck. Increasing their capacity (across up to thousands of kilometers) isn't easily done in a few years even.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    It's not an engineering problem either. The thing is though, a lot of heavy industry is built in the North to take advantage of the cheap power there. Shoring up the grid connections would increase the electricity rates in the northern region, due to competition from the South.
- lstodd 3y ago
  Which is why you need gas turbines for minor fluctuations. Buuut if you don't have any nuclear it's gas all the way. EDIT: and yes, if the hydro is far away, it doesn't help much. Besides hydro also depends on weather, although on periods about 10 years or so. But when just once you don't have enough water then what?
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  >But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1] Modern reactors can actually ramp up for down pretty quickly, as far a the grid is considered. That is to say, they can go from 50% to 100% in an hour or two. However, you want to run them mostly constantly because once you build them, they are basically free power. Besides, Constant power IS what you want for a "stable base load". You can start and stop solar and wind basically at the push of a button for very rapid response. The point of Nuclear or fossil fuels with respect to the grid is reliability.
jacquesm 3y ago
This keeps being repeated but it's nonsense, there are many technical and economical ways to reduce the auxiliary baseload requirement to zero or very close to zero. These include: HVDC to couple geographically distant regions, storage, flexible consumption, reduction of baseload consumption, hydro power for baseload, pricing based on source etc.
bluGill 3y ago
That is not what base load is. Base load is about some power plants that needs days to weeks to start and stop. They are unable to follow load changes. You build them anyway because they cost much less $$$ to run, but you need non-base load to handle varying power demands as your base load doesn't throttle very well. While wind and solar do not meet the definition of base load, they clearly are in the spirit of base load. When doing wind and solar you need non-base load, not more base load.
- floxy 3y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=base+load&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=base+load&iax=images&ia=ima...

shinryuu 3y ago

Sweden has a large amount of hydropower as baseload though.

samuell 3y ago
The hydro power is located in the far north(west), meaning that there is a bottle-neck in the hundreds to thousands of km of transport lines needed to bring it to the big cities in the south. The capacity of these lines is simply not enough to supply the cities in the south with only hydro power base load, which is why Sweden had the four major nuclear power stations built in the south, in the vicinity of major urban areas. It was a really well thought out system, that has been degrading over the last years for political reasons.

jug 3y ago

> What if it’s not windy or sunny? Sweden is 528 000 km² and there is part a geographical spread even into sea which use to have weather patterns not following those at land, part complemented heavily by hydro, and part large battery parks already in use to complement wind. What kind of issues still remain after all these countermeasures? Still requiring countermeasures on the extremely costly scale of a massive nuclear expansion?

jen729w 3y ago
See my post, which I may have updated since you wrote this. Renewables, without massive grid storage to dampen their unreliability can not be the base load upon which your grid depends. This storage could exist, but we haven’t built it and it isn’t proven.
- jug 3y ago
  It is absolutely built and proven in numerous countries and more are planned / under construction by Vattenfall alone. https://group.vattenfall.com/what-we-do/roadmap-to-fossil-freedom/battery-storage-systems https://group.vattenfall.com/what-we-do/roadmap-to-fossil-fr...
kube-system 3y ago
After doing all of that, your wind and solar are no longer cheap. The cheap numbers per kwh for wind/solar currently are under the assumption that you take the power when you get it.
- jug 3y ago
  It doesn't matter if it's more expensive. The question if it eventually gets more expensive than nuclear, an energy form Sweden/Vattenfall recently turned away from because it was not financially feasible anymore.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    I've seen cited that the cheapest chemical battery storage is similar to the price of gas generation. If we're considering LCOE numbers, yes, that would be more expensive than nuclear then. Your local regulatory environment notwithstanding.

samuell 3y ago

Yea. You need to constantly produce the same amount of power that is being consumed, or you get a fall of the frequency in the system. Wind doesn't care about that. You don't need to look long at a graph showing the typical power production of wind vs something like nuclear over a day, to see that wind power is not only extremely unreliable. It also requires massive balancing measures from the other power types in the mix, which is sometimes easier said than done. You definitely want to let the wind power mostly "top up" the mix, and not constitute major parts of it, unless you have tons of something else to balance up the fluctuations with (related, nuclear is not great for balancing this, as it can't typically change output quickly, but is great as the base load, just as the parent comment says).

jug 3y ago
Speaking of topping up which I agree with, I think it bears saying here that today with unexpanded nuclear in Sweden, wind accounts for only about 20% of energy production. Or if only including renewable sources NOT including nuclear, wind still only accounts for about 30%.
- bjourne 3y ago
  Nuclear power "only" accounts for 29% of total production. Wind and especially offshore wind has huge potential to expand, but the government has taken an obstructionist stance towards that mode of power production. It doesn't make sense cutting wind subsidies amounting to a few billion while guaranteeing 400 billion to nuclear investments.
  - samuell 3y ago
    There has already been challenges in balancing out the extreme fluctuations from wind with the current amount (leading to the need to start gas turbines which were meant for emergency power multiple times over the last few years, and even oil plants), and expanding it would only make this worse, as there would not be enough easily balancing power sources close by (hydro can be used to balance to some extent, but are hundreds to thousands of km away, with limited capacity in the extremely long power lines, meaning that it can't account for all of that).

kieranmaine 3y ago

> Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny? Battery storage can fill the gap. This blog post makes a good argument why battery storage and over provisioning of renewables could solve this problem - https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-batteries-will-win/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-b.... In addition it doesn't include dynamically controlling demand (for example not charging EVs when demand is high). > So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point. Sweden doesn't appear to use coal as baseload. The UK did, but managed to replace most of it with gas, wind, solar, reduced demand and increased imports (https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/historicaldata/ https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/historicaldata/).

jen729w 3y ago
> and increased imports From France, who has a shit-load of nuclear. :-)
- kieranmaine 3y ago
  I'm for more nuclear (a decent amount is generated in the UK), but I think your statement: "So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point." doesn't take into the impact storage (both stationary and in the form of EVs) will have in the future.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > the impact storage (both stationary and in the form of EVs) will have in the future. Have you ever heard the expression "hope is not a plan"?
    - kieranmaine 3y ago
      I'm basing this on the huge increase in battery production. From https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-scale-battery-storage-additions-2017-2022 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s...: * Annual grid-scale battery storage additions went from 0.76 GW in 2016 to 11.21 GW in 2022. I couldn't find the GWh figures, but this is a fast ramp up. * "In September 2022, India released its draft National Electricity Plan, setting out ambitious targets for the development of battery energy storage, with an estimated capacity of between 51 to 84 GW installed by 2031-32." * "In December 2022, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency...announced funding support for a total of 2 GW/4.2 GWh of grid-scale storage capacity, equipped with grid-forming inverters to provide essential system services that are currently supplied by thermal power plants." From https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive...: * "Automotive lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery demand increased by about 65% to 550 GWh in 2022, from about 330 GWh in 2021" * "August 2022 and March 2023, major EV and battery makers announced cumulative post-IRA investments of at least USD 52 billion in North American EV supply chains – of which 50% is for battery manufacturing, and about 20% each for battery components and EV manufacturing." These pages also list the challenges faced, so I'm not assuming it's a smooth road ahead. However, the trend is clear. Hopefully, technological improvements will continue and drive down costs further (I have no knowledge if this will happen). I hope there's improvements in nuclear technology that allow for a faster, cheaper nuclear rollout and belief it has it's place. But to return to original comment I replied that states "we need something to replace coal...that thing can...only be nuclear at this point" dismisses the increases in investment and production of battery storage.

eesmith 3y ago

Sweden doesn't use coal to any appreciable degree. Hydro provides about 42%, nuclear 29%, wind 21%, thermal power 5.8%, and "unspecified" at 1.9%. (Thanks to HN user fifilura who pointed people to the dashboard at https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ a few months ago, showing the real-time data and breakdown.)

morsch 3y ago

> So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1]. This makes it a poor companion to renewables. [1] Except for the couple of weeks a year when it's down for maintenance, refueling, or its river's water has gotten too hot or there isn't enough of it, then the output is zero. Actually, it's negative because you need to provide it with energy or it self-destroys.

samuell 3y ago
Yes, you need a quicker power source to balance, and Sweden got that with the hydro power. The hydro power is not enough as base power for the large cities in the south, on the other hand, in part because in part the capacity is not enough, and in part because how the extremely long transport lines from the far north (where the hydro power is located) to the major cities in the south are a serious bottle-neck. Increasing their capacity (across up to thousands of kilometers) isn't easily done in a few years even.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  It's not an engineering problem either. The thing is though, a lot of heavy industry is built in the North to take advantage of the cheap power there. Shoring up the grid connections would increase the electricity rates in the northern region, due to competition from the South.
lstodd 3y ago
Which is why you need gas turbines for minor fluctuations. Buuut if you don't have any nuclear it's gas all the way. EDIT: and yes, if the hydro is far away, it doesn't help much. Besides hydro also depends on weather, although on periods about 10 years or so. But when just once you don't have enough water then what?
s1artibartfast 3y ago
>But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1] Modern reactors can actually ramp up for down pretty quickly, as far a the grid is considered. That is to say, they can go from 50% to 100% in an hour or two. However, you want to run them mostly constantly because once you build them, they are basically free power. Besides, Constant power IS what you want for a "stable base load". You can start and stop solar and wind basically at the push of a button for very rapid response. The point of Nuclear or fossil fuels with respect to the grid is reliability.

jacquesm 3y ago

This keeps being repeated but it's nonsense, there are many technical and economical ways to reduce the auxiliary baseload requirement to zero or very close to zero. These include: HVDC to couple geographically distant regions, storage, flexible consumption, reduction of baseload consumption, hydro power for baseload, pricing based on source etc.

bluGill 3y ago

That is not what base load is. Base load is about some power plants that needs days to weeks to start and stop. They are unable to follow load changes. You build them anyway because they cost much less $$$ to run, but you need non-base load to handle varying power demands as your base load doesn't throttle very well. While wind and solar do not meet the definition of base load, they clearly are in the spirit of base load. When doing wind and solar you need non-base load, not more base load.

floxy 3y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=base+load&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=base+load&iax=images&ia=ima...