3 ms·

What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants

• Closi 1y ago
  I'm just going on the fact that most energy experts say a diversified mix is what you usually want - although my lay assumption would be that if you have a portion of your energy need covered by a stable base load, you need less batteries per wind turbine etc and it lowers overall energy risk. e.g. lets pick two overly-simplified hypothetical scenarios where you can have a 50/50 nuclear/wind mix, or 100% wind mix. And then lets say in a shortage scenario you can: - Suppress demand / demand shift (say you can reduce/shift demand 10% hypothetically) - Import energy, up to 20% of your total requirement In this simple scenario, in a 100% wind scenario, you would need to cover 60% of your energy need with batteries (every 1% of wind needs 0.6% of batteries), but in the 50/50 mix scenario the 50% of wind only needs to cover 10% with batteries (i.e. every 1% of wind needs 0.2% of batteries) In reality there will be other things, like you might also have burst-gas power etc. I'm not saying the numbers above are correct - just trying to show in theory that a mix / base load can still help reduce the level of batteries/storage required and make the energy mix more economic.