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> , baseload needs are much, much lower so than they used to be. No, they aren't. You said, and I quote, "base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as

• hef19898 3y ago
  You know what we had decades ago that required electricity 24/7? Steel mills, heavy industry, trains, 3-shift operated production sites and domestic appliances. You know what we have today requiring 24/7 electricity? The same list... Unless you think modern industry came into being with the internet...
  • troupo 3y ago
    Funny how it's both "the same things" and "we don't need the same baseload anymore". Meanwhile electricity consumption has grown almost 5-fold since 1980 https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu... and ~7.5-fold since the 1950s: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
    • hef19898 3y ago
      Yes, electricity consomption increased. As did industrial output and GDP, across the world. Not sure where the surprise is in that. And I never said we don't need baseload anymore, I said, and that is confirmed by grid operators, studies and first habd knowldge, that demand, and there only big consumers matter, is getting more and more flexible. Hence, baseload is less important today than it was before. Know why industrial consumers do that? Money, they are paid for that flexibility: either by getting free electricity or getting paid (negative prices) at certain periods. Or by getting paid to not consume electricity in certain periods, same way peaker plants are paid to generate electrivity in these periods to maintain grid balance. The large cobsumers do this, as I said, since at least a decade (first time I was directly involved with it, so propably longer), and they do this on production equipment and processes almost a century old. We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are predictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes (almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that). Not sure what's so hard to understand about any of that...
      • troupo 3y ago
        > And I never said we don't need baseload anymore, I said, and that is confirmed by grid operators, studies So far we only have your word for it > and first habd knowldge And this is your word. That's it. The rest I really don't care about because I'm just as capable of writing plausible-sounding walls of text without a single link to a study or a statistic. I try not to do that. > that demand, and there only big consumers matter Ah yes. Only big consumers. We've increased our electricity requirements 5-fold, but that doesn't matter. The "big consumers" will halt their production when there isn't enough electricity. > We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are unpredictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes I'd say often > almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that The grid can mitigate it if there's a stable baseload generation available. A month ago there was a day when all of Europe's wind and solar combined was producing something like 10% of installed capacity. Saved by copious amounts of coal burning (and also by nuclear and some hydro). So, riddle me this: when there isn't enough renewable energy, do "big consumers" halt their production, or the electricity consumption remains the same? And what does this tell you about "we don't require as much baseload anymore", given that our electricity requirements have grown 500% in the past 40 years?