5 ms·

How is base load a false concept?

gpm 6mo ago
Base load is marketing term for electricity supply which cannot economically follow the demand curve and is only affordable if you can use a constant supply of it. It's not a feature, it's a bug. What you want is dispatchable power. The term vaguely makes sense if there are sources of electricity that output a constant supply that are cheaper than the dispatchable sources of power. Like nuclear was supposed to be (but in the end is not). Or in some very specific locations hydro (without a reservoir) and geothermal are. But as often bandied about as a "type of power that must be filled" it simply doesn't exist. The type of power that must be filled is dispatachable power, everything else is just "well what cheap non-dispatchable sources can we use to avoid using more expensive dispatchable power".
- nradov 6mo ago
  Base load is a feature, not a bug. Companies planning new industrial facilities need long-term guarantees of reliable 24×7 power with predictable rates. Otherwise they'll build elsewhere. Dispatchable power doesn't help them.
  - gpm 6mo ago
    Base load power cannot provide predictable rates because it provides a fixed amount of power that the market then bids on. If there's too much demand rates go up arbitrarily high. If there's too little rates go to zero. Dispatchable power is the only sort of power that provides 24x7 power with predictable rates. If there's more demand, you produce more power (at the same cost). If there's less, you produce less so you can sell what you do produce at the same cost.
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      Base load provides predictable cheap power at night. Which is why heavy industry runs third shift only (only rare industy is this way), and shuts down for maintenance in december (christman lights). Now that wind is cheap they are changing shifts because nobody wants to work third shift if they don't have to.
    - nradov 6mo ago
      Nope. What you're describing is an artifact of certain electricity markets work for spot prices. This is artificial, not inevitable. Large industrial customers often bypass those markets and contract directly with producers for fixed rates.
      - jltsiren 6mo ago
        It's the natural way commodities are priced in the market. Those large industrial customers often also end up selling the electricity in the market. Power companies need multi-decade commitments before they are willing to build anything as capital intensive as a nuclear reactor. In that time, industrial customers need to modernize their factories to keep them competitive. Which is often the time they realize it's more profitable to invest that money somewhere else and wind down the old factories.
    - maxerickson 6mo ago
      Is a more predictable rate obviously better than a lower average rate?
      - gpm 6mo ago
        No not at all, I just didn't feel the need to challenge that assumption that the person I responded to made.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    industry needs perdictable cheap power. They only care about base load because it is traditionally cheap enough to schedule your energy intensive work around. Wind and solar are much cheaper and we are often good enough at predicting it for industry.
    - nradov 6mo ago
      Not for industry that needs to run when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Sure, in theory maybe someday battery storage will present another option but that won't be realistic or economically feasible for many years.
      - bluGill 6mo ago
        There are lots of different industries with different needs. The ones that use a lot of energy make as many changes to how they work as they can to get cheap energy. They don't run 24x7 if they don't have to.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  > What you want is dispatchable power. That's the most expensive one, especially if you both need it to be reliable (can't be a battery that can run out) and need it to not emit CO2 (can't be natural gas peaker plants). So what you want is to minimize the amount of dispatchable power that you need. Which is what baseload does up to the point that it's generating the "base" (i.e. typical daily minimum) amount of load, because then you don't need any of that portion of the load to be dispatchable since the baseload plants will handle it ~100% of the time. If baseload is half of peak load then you only need 50% of peak load to be dispatchable because baseload sources handle the other half. If you have no baseload sources then you need enough dispatchable sources to handle 100% of the peak load in case that's the only thing available some days/times, e.g. when peak load is after sunset and solar output is zero. The difference gets even more significant when you consider the possibility of reducing demand through pricing. Suppose raising the price by a moderate amount can lower the daily average demand by 25%; past that you start hitting inelastic demand and would need unrealistically high prices. If you have baseload as 50% of generation then you now only need dispatchable sources to handle 25% of peak load because the other 25% can be achieved through pricing. Without baseload sources you need 75% -- three times as much instead of twice as much. More than that, it reduces to 25% the amount of long-term dispatchable power you need, i.e. things that cost a fixed amount to have and are also expensive to use but can't run out of capacity. Things you might only use two weeks out of two years, like hydrogen fuel cells or expensive flow batteries; you don't want to need three times as much of those. Meanwhile you can use short-term dispatchable power (i.e. normal batteries) to do things like handle the peak demand in the early evening while charging them using solar during the day. The period after sunset but before the load falls off is only a few hours long, so you only need 50% of total capacity for ~15% of the hours in the day, i.e. having only 7.5% of daily capacity would mean that you don't have to use demand suppression through pricing unless you have an extended supply shortfall from renewables. Whereas if you don't have baseload then you need enough batteries for ~50% of daily capacity because now you need enough batteries to handle the entire peak demand in the early evening instead of half and the entire demand late at night instead of none. On top of the long-term storage in case the batteries run out.
  - gpm 6mo ago
    > That's the most expensive one This is the assumption that justifies the term "base load". In most cases it is simply false. > especially if you both need it to be reliable (can't be a battery that can run out) No source of power is 100% reliable, in practice power plants have unplanned outages a single-digits-percent amount of the time. Batteries charged by non-dispatchable power easily match this. Of course in reality you want a grid with many power plants so that when one is down the rest probably aren't. "Probably" does some work though, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-french-nuclear-fleet-is-shut-for-works-squeezing-supply https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-f... Excess dispatchable power helps make up for when that probably doesn't turn out in your favor. > and need it to not emit CO2 If we're banning CO2 emissions then up until the last couple of years in most places your only option would be to overbuild nuclear until the point that it was dispatchable and not base load power. Naturally no one did this because it would be obscenely expensive. Now of course you'd have the options of any of the clean energy sources (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, etc) powering batteries.

gpm 6mo ago

Base load is marketing term for electricity supply which cannot economically follow the demand curve and is only affordable if you can use a constant supply of it. It's not a feature, it's a bug. What you want is dispatchable power. The term vaguely makes sense if there are sources of electricity that output a constant supply that are cheaper than the dispatchable sources of power. Like nuclear was supposed to be (but in the end is not). Or in some very specific locations hydro (without a reservoir) and geothermal are. But as often bandied about as a "type of power that must be filled" it simply doesn't exist. The type of power that must be filled is dispatachable power, everything else is just "well what cheap non-dispatchable sources can we use to avoid using more expensive dispatchable power".

nradov 6mo ago
Base load is a feature, not a bug. Companies planning new industrial facilities need long-term guarantees of reliable 24×7 power with predictable rates. Otherwise they'll build elsewhere. Dispatchable power doesn't help them.
- gpm 6mo ago
  Base load power cannot provide predictable rates because it provides a fixed amount of power that the market then bids on. If there's too much demand rates go up arbitrarily high. If there's too little rates go to zero. Dispatchable power is the only sort of power that provides 24x7 power with predictable rates. If there's more demand, you produce more power (at the same cost). If there's less, you produce less so you can sell what you do produce at the same cost.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Base load provides predictable cheap power at night. Which is why heavy industry runs third shift only (only rare industy is this way), and shuts down for maintenance in december (christman lights). Now that wind is cheap they are changing shifts because nobody wants to work third shift if they don't have to.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    Nope. What you're describing is an artifact of certain electricity markets work for spot prices. This is artificial, not inevitable. Large industrial customers often bypass those markets and contract directly with producers for fixed rates.
    - jltsiren 6mo ago
      It's the natural way commodities are priced in the market. Those large industrial customers often also end up selling the electricity in the market. Power companies need multi-decade commitments before they are willing to build anything as capital intensive as a nuclear reactor. In that time, industrial customers need to modernize their factories to keep them competitive. Which is often the time they realize it's more profitable to invest that money somewhere else and wind down the old factories.
  - maxerickson 6mo ago
    Is a more predictable rate obviously better than a lower average rate?
    - gpm 6mo ago
      No not at all, I just didn't feel the need to challenge that assumption that the person I responded to made.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  industry needs perdictable cheap power. They only care about base load because it is traditionally cheap enough to schedule your energy intensive work around. Wind and solar are much cheaper and we are often good enough at predicting it for industry.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    Not for industry that needs to run when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Sure, in theory maybe someday battery storage will present another option but that won't be realistic or economically feasible for many years.
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      There are lots of different industries with different needs. The ones that use a lot of energy make as many changes to how they work as they can to get cheap energy. They don't run 24x7 if they don't have to.
AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
> What you want is dispatchable power. That's the most expensive one, especially if you both need it to be reliable (can't be a battery that can run out) and need it to not emit CO2 (can't be natural gas peaker plants). So what you want is to minimize the amount of dispatchable power that you need. Which is what baseload does up to the point that it's generating the "base" (i.e. typical daily minimum) amount of load, because then you don't need any of that portion of the load to be dispatchable since the baseload plants will handle it ~100% of the time. If baseload is half of peak load then you only need 50% of peak load to be dispatchable because baseload sources handle the other half. If you have no baseload sources then you need enough dispatchable sources to handle 100% of the peak load in case that's the only thing available some days/times, e.g. when peak load is after sunset and solar output is zero. The difference gets even more significant when you consider the possibility of reducing demand through pricing. Suppose raising the price by a moderate amount can lower the daily average demand by 25%; past that you start hitting inelastic demand and would need unrealistically high prices. If you have baseload as 50% of generation then you now only need dispatchable sources to handle 25% of peak load because the other 25% can be achieved through pricing. Without baseload sources you need 75% -- three times as much instead of twice as much. More than that, it reduces to 25% the amount of long-term dispatchable power you need, i.e. things that cost a fixed amount to have and are also expensive to use but can't run out of capacity. Things you might only use two weeks out of two years, like hydrogen fuel cells or expensive flow batteries; you don't want to need three times as much of those. Meanwhile you can use short-term dispatchable power (i.e. normal batteries) to do things like handle the peak demand in the early evening while charging them using solar during the day. The period after sunset but before the load falls off is only a few hours long, so you only need 50% of total capacity for ~15% of the hours in the day, i.e. having only 7.5% of daily capacity would mean that you don't have to use demand suppression through pricing unless you have an extended supply shortfall from renewables. Whereas if you don't have baseload then you need enough batteries for ~50% of daily capacity because now you need enough batteries to handle the entire peak demand in the early evening instead of half and the entire demand late at night instead of none. On top of the long-term storage in case the batteries run out.
- gpm 6mo ago
  > That's the most expensive one This is the assumption that justifies the term "base load". In most cases it is simply false. > especially if you both need it to be reliable (can't be a battery that can run out) No source of power is 100% reliable, in practice power plants have unplanned outages a single-digits-percent amount of the time. Batteries charged by non-dispatchable power easily match this. Of course in reality you want a grid with many power plants so that when one is down the rest probably aren't. "Probably" does some work though, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-french-nuclear-fleet-is-shut-for-works-squeezing-supply https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-f... Excess dispatchable power helps make up for when that probably doesn't turn out in your favor. > and need it to not emit CO2 If we're banning CO2 emissions then up until the last couple of years in most places your only option would be to overbuild nuclear until the point that it was dispatchable and not base load power. Naturally no one did this because it would be obscenely expensive. Now of course you'd have the options of any of the clean energy sources (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, etc) powering batteries.