5 ms·

Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation". Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners

Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation". Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants. In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable. To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants. That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants. If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.

masterj 1y ago
Modern geothermal is dispatchable. It's a really good compliment to wind and solar https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-geothermal/ https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-ge...
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  But is it usefully dispatchable? Nuclear can be made dispatchable but it's not usefully dispatchable because the costs are fairly similar whether the plant is on or off. Like nuclear, I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs, suggesting that it isn't usefully dispatchable. But that's too simplistic. A big limitation of geothermal is that rock has poor thermal conductivity. So once you remove heat it takes a while for it to warm up again. If you're running it 100% then you need a large area to compensate. OTOH, if you're running it at a lower duty cycle you likely need less area. So if you know the duty cycle in advance, then you can likely significantly reduce costs. Yay! But that also means that you likely can't run a plant built for low duty cycles continuously for 2 weeks during a dankelflaute. It's likely great for smoothing out daily cycles, but not as good for smoothing out annual cycles. That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.
  - hluska 1y ago
    That’s a lot of words to admit that geothermal has its place.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      That wasn't the conclusion, though. The conclusion was that dispatchable geothermal is competing against daily cycling batteries, a competition it's likely to lose on cost.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    > I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs Higher capital costs, but not nuclear high capital costs. > That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive. It likely would supplement batteries rather than compete against them. A battery buffer would allow a geothermal plant to slowly rise to load and fall as that load goes away. A very large battery can store 200MWh worth of energy. The largest geothermal plant produces 1.5GW. (A lot of the large plants look like they are in the range of 100->200MW). Presumably those plants can run for more than a few hours which ultimately decreases the amount of batteries needed to smooth out the demand curve.
    - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
      A very large battery storage site, like the top 10 currently running has an order of magnitude more energy storage than you suggest. The largest under construction for go live in 2027 has another order of magnitude, 19000MWh and will deliver up to 1000MW. Things are changing fast as battery prices drop and experience accumulates.
      - mapmap 1y ago
        Is that correct only 1MW of power but 19,000MWh of storage? That would take over two years to drain it.
XorNot 1y ago
In 2025 the power consumption of my state (NSW, Australia) on any given day will be greater then 5 GW. https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-... This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks). It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later this evening or tomorrow morning I can guarantee you the same thing: my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.
- jamescrowley 1y ago
  Baseload is traditionally about generation, not consumption. And baseload generation only makes sense when it is the cheapest option. When solar and wind produce at near-zero marginal cost, running inflexible baseload beside them just forces cheaper generation to switch off, driving up system costs. What the grid needs is dispatchable capacity - batteries, hydro, gas peakers (if we must) and demand shifting - that can plug the gaps when cheaper forms of generation cannot.
  - cbmuser 1y ago
    It sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in practice. Just compare Germany to France.
    - dalyons 1y ago
      This is such a tired trope. The differences between the two countries present day energy situation doesn’t tell you anything about how the world should proceed tomorrow. Unless you have a time machine that you can use to get every country to build state subsided nuclear 50 years ago.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        Not even France can replicate their nuclear construction of decades ago.
jmward01 1y ago
The right answer is 'yes to all the above'. Yes, we need solar. Yes, we need wind. Yes, we need batteries and, yes, we should be looking at geothermal. Solar has shown us, again, how artificially holding back a technology for decades has massive costs. Investing a few billion into geothermal right now is cheap and can only lead to a more durable energy infrastructure in the future. There are all sorts of benefits to a rich ecosystem of power generation. Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Similarly, having multiple solutions means that niche use cases have more options and a larger likelihood of finding an acceptable solution. So, yes to all of the above. We are big enough to try them all.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  > Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Solar and batteries aren't consumables, so they're not particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. If we lose our supply of batteries, we'll have ~10 years or so to find an alternate supply. We won't be able to do new installations during the disruption, but existing installations don't stop working. Unlike a fossil plant when the supply of fuel is disrupted.
  - hvb2 1y ago
    You may need small amounts of rare earth elements. Those are definitely a supply chain nightmare.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      Not for solar, and not for most forms of Li-ion batteries.
      - Aloisius 1y ago
        You need them for solar inverters, but you also need them for the turbines like those used to generate power with geothermal/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc.
cbmuser 1y ago
Or just build out nuclear like France and pay just 20 Cents per kWh. https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Offres/Grille_prix_Tarif_Bleu.pdf https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...
- danw1979 1y ago
  Yes please from the UK, where it’s 27 euro cents per kWh currently.
- testing22321 1y ago
  The two nukes that recently came on line in the US were so over budget and timeline that all customers now pay a “surcharge” on their bill to pay for it. Western counties building nukes is so expensive it makes the cost of electricity go up.
  - aloha2436 1y ago
    France is a western country with its own economic and labour troubles. The enormous expense of building nukes in the US is entirely its own making and much more complicated than just "western" inefficiency.
    - dmix 1y ago
      Hyper administrative state-capitalist economies all have the same problem with infrastructure. The US has an image of being more capitalist and efficient, which is true to a degree, but once you get a large-scale project that hits all fed->state->municipal politics it's not much different than France. It's just minor variations of who the mandatory 'stakeholders' are ...who demands a cut and who delays/blocks progress. As soon as some project is being pitched by politicians as "creating thousands of local jobs" it's either DOA or will be many years late and over budget.
    - hvb2 1y ago
      You might want to look up flammanville. They built a new reactor there and that also took 20 years or so and was way over budget. We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now. Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
P.S. this is a response to the original title, which has since changed making my comment look off-topic.
inglor_cz 1y ago
Suitable locations for pumped hydro are very limited, it is a comparably rare resource. A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat. Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.) For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Suitable locations for on river pumped hydro are limited. But off river? The possibilities are vast.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Pumped hydro just requires a lake at the bottom of a slope. Unlike hydro generation, it doesn't require flow. Here's almost a million locations suitable for pumped hydro: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
  - defrost 1y ago
    Two farm dams at a minimum, one at either end of a slope. You can serve a small town of 500 or so people (plus tourists) with a mini systems for ~ $8 million (AU) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      And that location probably wasn't on the ANU map, meaning there were are far more than 1 million suitable locations.
thedrbrian 1y ago
Its so easy that you can’t name me a single city of more than 10000 people that runs entirely off renewables.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Norway and British Columbia are 99% renewable energy and they have many cities larger than that.
  - cgh 1y ago
    Canada as a whole is roughly 70% hydroelectric.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  Weakly defined. What does "run entirely off renewables" mean? We know that in North America, for example, significant energy use comes from transportation and heating requirements, and that at this time, very little transportation is powered by renewables, and not a whole lot of heat either (though both are growing). On the other hand, the entire current residential electrical demand of the city of Santa Fe (about 82k people) can be met with a single relatively small PV+BESS plant (and might just be if it manages to get built).
robocat 1y ago
> pumped hydro for long term storage. You are using long-term in an extremely vague way. Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes. For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-burning Huntley and peakers to somewhat cover occasional low hydro generation. Unfortunately our existing generators also have regulatory capture, and they prevent generating competition (e.g. new solar farms) through rather dirty tactics (according to the insider I spoke with). Apparently much of our hydro generation is equivalent to “run-of-river” which requires the river to flow. Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year. NZ had planned a pumped hydro, but it was expensive: planned cost of 16 billion compared against total NZ export income of ~100 billion. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-is-dumping-hugely-wasteful-lake-onslow-battery-project https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-... So completely uneconomic risk (plus other problems like NIMBY).
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Long term storage is definitely the weak point of moving to 100% carbon free electricity. Unfortunately geothermal does not cover this need. If we want to cover a dankelflaute with geothermal, we basically need enough geothermal to cover ~100% of our power needs. Pumped hydro is the best answer we have at the moment, even if it isn't a great answer. What will likely happen is that people will decide that "99% is good enough", and use fossil generators to cover dankelflautes,
  - dalyons 1y ago
    Which is honestly fine, we would be in such an amazing place if we got to 99%
  - NedF 1y ago
    [dead]
  - robocat 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

masterj 1y ago

Modern geothermal is dispatchable. It's a really good compliment to wind and solar https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-geothermal/ https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-ge...

bryanlarsen 1y ago
But is it usefully dispatchable? Nuclear can be made dispatchable but it's not usefully dispatchable because the costs are fairly similar whether the plant is on or off. Like nuclear, I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs, suggesting that it isn't usefully dispatchable. But that's too simplistic. A big limitation of geothermal is that rock has poor thermal conductivity. So once you remove heat it takes a while for it to warm up again. If you're running it 100% then you need a large area to compensate. OTOH, if you're running it at a lower duty cycle you likely need less area. So if you know the duty cycle in advance, then you can likely significantly reduce costs. Yay! But that also means that you likely can't run a plant built for low duty cycles continuously for 2 weeks during a dankelflaute. It's likely great for smoothing out daily cycles, but not as good for smoothing out annual cycles. That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.
- hluska 1y ago
  That’s a lot of words to admit that geothermal has its place.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    That wasn't the conclusion, though. The conclusion was that dispatchable geothermal is competing against daily cycling batteries, a competition it's likely to lose on cost.
- cogman10 1y ago
  > I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs Higher capital costs, but not nuclear high capital costs. > That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive. It likely would supplement batteries rather than compete against them. A battery buffer would allow a geothermal plant to slowly rise to load and fall as that load goes away. A very large battery can store 200MWh worth of energy. The largest geothermal plant produces 1.5GW. (A lot of the large plants look like they are in the range of 100->200MW). Presumably those plants can run for more than a few hours which ultimately decreases the amount of batteries needed to smooth out the demand curve.
  - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    A very large battery storage site, like the top 10 currently running has an order of magnitude more energy storage than you suggest. The largest under construction for go live in 2027 has another order of magnitude, 19000MWh and will deliver up to 1000MW. Things are changing fast as battery prices drop and experience accumulates.
    - mapmap 1y ago
      Is that correct only 1MW of power but 19,000MWh of storage? That would take over two years to drain it.

XorNot 1y ago

In 2025 the power consumption of my state (NSW, Australia) on any given day will be greater then 5 GW. https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-... This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks). It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later this evening or tomorrow morning I can guarantee you the same thing: my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.

jamescrowley 1y ago
Baseload is traditionally about generation, not consumption. And baseload generation only makes sense when it is the cheapest option. When solar and wind produce at near-zero marginal cost, running inflexible baseload beside them just forces cheaper generation to switch off, driving up system costs. What the grid needs is dispatchable capacity - batteries, hydro, gas peakers (if we must) and demand shifting - that can plug the gaps when cheaper forms of generation cannot.
- cbmuser 1y ago
  It sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in practice. Just compare Germany to France.
  - dalyons 1y ago
    This is such a tired trope. The differences between the two countries present day energy situation doesn’t tell you anything about how the world should proceed tomorrow. Unless you have a time machine that you can use to get every country to build state subsided nuclear 50 years ago.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      Not even France can replicate their nuclear construction of decades ago.

jmward01 1y ago

The right answer is 'yes to all the above'. Yes, we need solar. Yes, we need wind. Yes, we need batteries and, yes, we should be looking at geothermal. Solar has shown us, again, how artificially holding back a technology for decades has massive costs. Investing a few billion into geothermal right now is cheap and can only lead to a more durable energy infrastructure in the future. There are all sorts of benefits to a rich ecosystem of power generation. Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Similarly, having multiple solutions means that niche use cases have more options and a larger likelihood of finding an acceptable solution. So, yes to all of the above. We are big enough to try them all.

bryanlarsen 1y ago
> Solar and batteries may be amazing but global supply chains can be disrupted. Solar and batteries aren't consumables, so they're not particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. If we lose our supply of batteries, we'll have ~10 years or so to find an alternate supply. We won't be able to do new installations during the disruption, but existing installations don't stop working. Unlike a fossil plant when the supply of fuel is disrupted.
- hvb2 1y ago
  You may need small amounts of rare earth elements. Those are definitely a supply chain nightmare.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Not for solar, and not for most forms of Li-ion batteries.
    - Aloisius 1y ago
      You need them for solar inverters, but you also need them for the turbines like those used to generate power with geothermal/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc.

cbmuser 1y ago

Or just build out nuclear like France and pay just 20 Cents per kWh. https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Offres/Grille_prix_Tarif_Bleu.pdf https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

danw1979 1y ago
Yes please from the UK, where it’s 27 euro cents per kWh currently.
testing22321 1y ago
The two nukes that recently came on line in the US were so over budget and timeline that all customers now pay a “surcharge” on their bill to pay for it. Western counties building nukes is so expensive it makes the cost of electricity go up.
- aloha2436 1y ago
  France is a western country with its own economic and labour troubles. The enormous expense of building nukes in the US is entirely its own making and much more complicated than just "western" inefficiency.
  - dmix 1y ago
    Hyper administrative state-capitalist economies all have the same problem with infrastructure. The US has an image of being more capitalist and efficient, which is true to a degree, but once you get a large-scale project that hits all fed->state->municipal politics it's not much different than France. It's just minor variations of who the mandatory 'stakeholders' are ...who demands a cut and who delays/blocks progress. As soon as some project is being pitched by politicians as "creating thousands of local jobs" it's either DOA or will be many years late and over budget.
  - hvb2 1y ago
    You might want to look up flammanville. They built a new reactor there and that also took 20 years or so and was way over budget. We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now. Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

P.S. this is a response to the original title, which has since changed making my comment look off-topic.

inglor_cz 1y ago

Suitable locations for pumped hydro are very limited, it is a comparably rare resource. A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat. Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.) For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.

pfdietz 1y ago
Suitable locations for on river pumped hydro are limited. But off river? The possibilities are vast.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
Pumped hydro just requires a lake at the bottom of a slope. Unlike hydro generation, it doesn't require flow. Here's almost a million locations suitable for pumped hydro: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
- defrost 1y ago
  Two farm dams at a minimum, one at either end of a slope. You can serve a small town of 500 or so people (plus tourists) with a mini systems for ~ $8 million (AU) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    And that location probably wasn't on the ANU map, meaning there were are far more than 1 million suitable locations.

thedrbrian 1y ago

Its so easy that you can’t name me a single city of more than 10000 people that runs entirely off renewables.

bryanlarsen 1y ago
Norway and British Columbia are 99% renewable energy and they have many cities larger than that.
- cgh 1y ago
  Canada as a whole is roughly 70% hydroelectric.
PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
Weakly defined. What does "run entirely off renewables" mean? We know that in North America, for example, significant energy use comes from transportation and heating requirements, and that at this time, very little transportation is powered by renewables, and not a whole lot of heat either (though both are growing). On the other hand, the entire current residential electrical demand of the city of Santa Fe (about 82k people) can be met with a single relatively small PV+BESS plant (and might just be if it manages to get built).

robocat 1y ago

> pumped hydro for long term storage. You are using long-term in an extremely vague way. Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes. For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-burning Huntley and peakers to somewhat cover occasional low hydro generation. Unfortunately our existing generators also have regulatory capture, and they prevent generating competition (e.g. new solar farms) through rather dirty tactics (according to the insider I spoke with). Apparently much of our hydro generation is equivalent to “run-of-river” which requires the river to flow. Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year. NZ had planned a pumped hydro, but it was expensive: planned cost of 16 billion compared against total NZ export income of ~100 billion. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-is-dumping-hugely-wasteful-lake-onslow-battery-project https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-... So completely uneconomic risk (plus other problems like NIMBY).

bryanlarsen 1y ago
Long term storage is definitely the weak point of moving to 100% carbon free electricity. Unfortunately geothermal does not cover this need. If we want to cover a dankelflaute with geothermal, we basically need enough geothermal to cover ~100% of our power needs. Pumped hydro is the best answer we have at the moment, even if it isn't a great answer. What will likely happen is that people will decide that "99% is good enough", and use fossil generators to cover dankelflautes,
- dalyons 1y ago
  Which is honestly fine, we would be in such an amazing place if we got to 99%
- NedF 1y ago
  [dead]
- robocat 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]