The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and oper

The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and operate most cheaply by pumping out at maximum efficiency 24 hours a day. You could then layer on the more expensive electricity sources that could spin up in 15 minutes or a few hours, and match the demand curve, as long as you matched baseload generators to the minimum of the demand curve, and have a cost-optimal electricity mix. Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve. Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!