5 ms·

Baseload Is a Myth (2024)

26 points by thecopy 2mo ago

bryanlarsen 2mo ago
The ironic part is that baseload is usually brought up by nuclear proponents along with comments about storage not being able to fill in the gaps. Yet pumped hydro storage was originally implemented in the 70's because nuclear of the time couldn't do peaking power. It was envisioned as a way to move cheap nuclear power generation from the nighttime lows to daytime peaks. Baseload is just a cost optimization. We need a power system that meeds demand 24/7/365. If we've done that then we've also provided baseload, by definition.
- rcxdude 2mo ago
  Yeah, nuclear wants storage (or gas peakers) just as much as renewables do.
  - alan-crowe 2mo ago
    That depends on where you live. If nuclear power is trying to match a fluctuating load it needs storage for a day or two, to escape the Xenon dead time. But solar power for air-conditioning only needs an hour or two of storage to bridge from peak solar at noon, to maximum demand mid-afternoon. On the other hand I live in Scotland. Solar power for space heating needs to save the summer sun for six months to heat homes in January. Ouch! Adding a day or two of storage to a nuclear power plant is much more practical.
    - rcxdude 2mo ago
      I mean, Scotland has more wind power than it can use (or transfer to England) at the moment, so solar is probably not the main focus. The price of nuclear plants also means you can afford to overbuild renewables by quite a lot to make up for seasonal variation and still come in at the same price.
      - Zanfa 2mo ago
        The problem is still long periods (up to weeks) of single-digit percentage of nominal capacity of power generation from wind farms. Overbuilding doesn’t help much, so a non-renewable option still needs to be available.
        roryirvine 2mo ago
        Wind droughts lasting a week or more are a 1-in-5 year event in the UK so, yes, must be accounted for. Nuclear is prone to similar issues - statutory outages for inspections and refuelling, and emergency outages which often affect multiple plants at the same time (eg. a cracked steam valve in one plant requiring remediation on the same component in the others). Keeping existing gas generators around, ready to be put into use when needed, is the simplest way of dealing with this until sufficient storage capacity is built out.
    - audunw 2mo ago
      If the energy you need is in the form of heating, it’s actually surprisingly viable to store energy for months. Heat batteries is probably the cheapest and easiest way to store energy for the long term. It’s just that it’s horribly inefficient to go back to electricity. So it’s more of an issue when you want to use that excess solar to power your computer in winter. If not nuclear, I think the northern regions need to focus on geothermal (Quaise?) and trash burning (yes, recycle first, but eventually everything non metal degrades and should be incinerated)
msandford 2mo ago
The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb. Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  Base load is real by statistics. However it is otherwise a useless concept. People talking about base load are universally wrong - wind and solar work just fine even if they can't provide the base load they are talking about: because we don't need base load in the way they think we do. Base load was a useful concept in the 1960s when the cheapest power plants couldn't follow load and so you needed to find the right mix between base load and the more expensive generation. Now that the old power plants are not the cheapest we don't care about it even though it statistically still exists.
- cbsmith 2mo ago
  The article concedes that there is a minimum power consumption. Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
  - throw0101d 2mo ago
    > Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth. The strategy would be to have economical, non-intermittent generation. It would be non-intermittent supply because that part of demand is non-intermittent.
    - bryanlarsen 2mo ago
      That strategy makes no sense when dispatchable power generation is cheaper than non-intermittent generation. This happened about 20 years ago when natgas became cheaper than coal.
thaumasiotes 2mo ago
> This part is still true, a meaningful amount of load is always required somewhere on the grid. > The gap in understanding comes with the second factor: belief that it is inherently more efficient to match this load with big thermal generation. > This comes from a historical contingency, where large stable loads matched very well with traditional coal-fired and nuclear power plants. These burn coal (or fission) to heat water, creating steam that then drives a turbine to generate electricity. > In both cases, getting the water up to temperature can take hours, and these plants do not handle fluctuations in demand well. They are much more efficient running steadily at a given rate. But, when operated at that steady rate, these large plants were historically some of the most cost effective available. > As a result, in most places a layered system of generators was built with large, slow-but-efficient coal and nuclear plants designed to serve the ‘baseload’ that would always be required. On top of this, faster-but-more-expensive gas, oil, and hydroelectric generators were layered. This model doesn't make sense. Suppose you have an existing setup with some coal plants and some oil plants. The coal plants like to stay on; the oil plants are more indifferent. There's a baseline load reflecting the amount of power demanded at almost all times of the day or night in whatever region contains this setup. Now we add some more coal plants. They like to stay on. They hate turning off. What will happen is that the local baseline load rises to accommodate the greater supply of power. Also, the price of electricity will go down. It just isn't the case that the amount of power people consume within any given region is independent of the power supply to that region! The baseload is set by the amount of power being delivered; it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload". Almost any level will.
- infamia 2mo ago
  > it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload". Lots of folks don't know that coal and gas fired plants are able to turn down their power generation more than 90% (i.e., "ten to one turn down"). It's definitely true that cold restarts take a while. However, they often rather quickly and dramatically change their power output profile while running.
  - 2mo ago
collinmcnulty 2mo ago
I think the lede is a bit buried here. The key point is that when renewables levelized cost is cheaper than the marginal cost of other sources (and I'll add, particularly when its below the fuel-only cost) the ability to economically displace those other sources is extremely strong.
hunterpayne 2mo ago
This article is largely non-scientific propaganda. LCOE is a fake stat that is never used to actually calculate any cost at any point. And anytime you use variable generation, you need to keep a spinning reserve, otherwise you get a blackout like what happened in Spain. HN should be ashamed to post such an article full of misinformation and half-truths not based on how engineering actually works.
- teamonkey 2mo ago
  You don’t need spinning reserve, but you do need enough reserve power that can supply grid-forming generation on demand. Batteries can react fast enough to peaks and troughs in voltage load, so long as there are enough of them where needed. Grid-forming batteries can react to frequency fluctuations electronically. Flywheels are another approach for grid stabilisation without a baseload.
slopinthebag 2mo ago
One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  You are not alone. There are a lot of people who have been confused since the 1970s. Even people who don't care about the environment have long recognized that hypocrisy.
- cbsmith 2mo ago
  ...because they have other goals beyond reduce carbon emissions.
- csb6 2mo ago
  I think a lot of it was driven by the Chernobyl disaster, which was a massive environmental and health catastrophe. But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.
  - masklinn 2mo ago
    The environmentalist hatred for nukes long predates Chernobyl (if anything Chernobyl was an environmental boon by driving humans out of the zone). It started as a justified disapproval of nuclear tests (especially open air) and military nuclear, but then nuclear militaries made sone pointed remarks about the health and safety of a few beatniks going against the military-industrial complex, oil companies started fl funding groups, and voila civilian nukes are an environmental problem.
  - throw0101d 2mo ago
    > But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized. Even other plants built in the same timeframe as Chernobyl are safer (not even getting to newer designs/builds), because in the West they were built with containment. The founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank isn't anti-nuclear: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-smoking-more-dangerous-radiation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
jillesvangurp 2mo ago
Discussions about baseload are meaningless unless you can articulate how much of it we're talking about (in gw, gwh, and $). Most discussions about this topic completely skip over that. Technically, what grids mostly need now that we have a lot of intermittent producers and consumers of energy is not a lot of very inflexible generation (which is what baseload boils down to) but a lot of flexibility in the grid that can be switched on/off and is able to rapidly adapt to changing supply and demand. The grid doesn't need gas plants that are running 24x7 and burn a lot of expensive gas when there's more than enough power being generated through the day from wind and solar, which tends to be a lot cheaper. But because that's intermittent, you still need other sources of power. The traditional interpretation of that is "baseload" i.e. the stuff that used to provide most of our power (coal, nuclear, and gas). But in the last few years we have a new alternative: batteries. This grew from next to nothing a few years ago to hundreds of GW of capacity. Soon TWs. Batteries can smooth out the peaks and dips and switch from charging to discharging in a few milliseconds. You might still need some other power beyond that but now you can carefully plan when to bring backup power online and take it offline again once it is no longer needed. Modern gas plants can switch on and off relatively quickly and are very suitable for providing tha backup power. Modern coal and nuclear plants can do that as well but are just a lot less attractive due to their higher cost. And if you are not utilizing backup plants most of the time, their cost is really important. Power that is 1) very expensive, and 2) can't be switched off easily or cheaply, is kind of a the opposite of what is needed. That's what baseload amounts to. It's the exact opposite of what is needed. A thing that's often overlooked in discussions like this is cables. Cables can move power around. And interconnected grids like the European or Chinese grids make use of that to deal with highly localized peaks and dips in energy due to weather and daily and seasonal changes in availability of e.g. sunlight. An east west cable can time shift power in early morning and late evening. A north south cable can move solar power from places close to the equator to places further away from it. There are some cable projects being planned to connect Africa to Europe, Australia to Singapore, and Canada to Europe. Cables + batteries deflate a lot of the economical argument for needing baseload.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
effnorwood 2mo ago
Are your lights on? Mine are. In case you didn't know about my "phantom load".

26 points by thecopy 2mo ago

The ironic part is that baseload is usually brought up by nuclear proponents along with comments about storage not being able to fill in the gaps. Yet pumped hydro storage was originally implemented in the 70's because nuclear of the time couldn't do peaking power. It was envisioned as a way to move cheap nuclear power generation from the nighttime lows to daytime peaks. Baseload is just a cost optimization. We need a power system that meeds demand 24/7/365. If we've done that then we've also provided baseload, by definition.

rcxdude 2mo ago
Yeah, nuclear wants storage (or gas peakers) just as much as renewables do.
- alan-crowe 2mo ago
  That depends on where you live. If nuclear power is trying to match a fluctuating load it needs storage for a day or two, to escape the Xenon dead time. But solar power for air-conditioning only needs an hour or two of storage to bridge from peak solar at noon, to maximum demand mid-afternoon. On the other hand I live in Scotland. Solar power for space heating needs to save the summer sun for six months to heat homes in January. Ouch! Adding a day or two of storage to a nuclear power plant is much more practical.
  - rcxdude 2mo ago
    I mean, Scotland has more wind power than it can use (or transfer to England) at the moment, so solar is probably not the main focus. The price of nuclear plants also means you can afford to overbuild renewables by quite a lot to make up for seasonal variation and still come in at the same price.
    - Zanfa 2mo ago
      The problem is still long periods (up to weeks) of single-digit percentage of nominal capacity of power generation from wind farms. Overbuilding doesn’t help much, so a non-renewable option still needs to be available.
      - roryirvine 2mo ago
        Wind droughts lasting a week or more are a 1-in-5 year event in the UK so, yes, must be accounted for. Nuclear is prone to similar issues - statutory outages for inspections and refuelling, and emergency outages which often affect multiple plants at the same time (eg. a cracked steam valve in one plant requiring remediation on the same component in the others). Keeping existing gas generators around, ready to be put into use when needed, is the simplest way of dealing with this until sufficient storage capacity is built out.
  - audunw 2mo ago
    If the energy you need is in the form of heating, it’s actually surprisingly viable to store energy for months. Heat batteries is probably the cheapest and easiest way to store energy for the long term. It’s just that it’s horribly inefficient to go back to electricity. So it’s more of an issue when you want to use that excess solar to power your computer in winter. If not nuclear, I think the northern regions need to focus on geothermal (Quaise?) and trash burning (yes, recycle first, but eventually everything non metal degrades and should be incinerated)

msandford 2mo ago

The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb. Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.

bluGill 2mo ago
Base load is real by statistics. However it is otherwise a useless concept. People talking about base load are universally wrong - wind and solar work just fine even if they can't provide the base load they are talking about: because we don't need base load in the way they think we do. Base load was a useful concept in the 1960s when the cheapest power plants couldn't follow load and so you needed to find the right mix between base load and the more expensive generation. Now that the old power plants are not the cheapest we don't care about it even though it statistically still exists.
cbsmith 2mo ago
The article concedes that there is a minimum power consumption. Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
- throw0101d 2mo ago
  > Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth. The strategy would be to have economical, non-intermittent generation. It would be non-intermittent supply because that part of demand is non-intermittent.
  - bryanlarsen 2mo ago
    That strategy makes no sense when dispatchable power generation is cheaper than non-intermittent generation. This happened about 20 years ago when natgas became cheaper than coal.

thaumasiotes 2mo ago

> This part is still true, a meaningful amount of load is always required somewhere on the grid. > The gap in understanding comes with the second factor: belief that it is inherently more efficient to match this load with big thermal generation. > This comes from a historical contingency, where large stable loads matched very well with traditional coal-fired and nuclear power plants. These burn coal (or fission) to heat water, creating steam that then drives a turbine to generate electricity. > In both cases, getting the water up to temperature can take hours, and these plants do not handle fluctuations in demand well. They are much more efficient running steadily at a given rate. But, when operated at that steady rate, these large plants were historically some of the most cost effective available. > As a result, in most places a layered system of generators was built with large, slow-but-efficient coal and nuclear plants designed to serve the ‘baseload’ that would always be required. On top of this, faster-but-more-expensive gas, oil, and hydroelectric generators were layered. This model doesn't make sense. Suppose you have an existing setup with some coal plants and some oil plants. The coal plants like to stay on; the oil plants are more indifferent. There's a baseline load reflecting the amount of power demanded at almost all times of the day or night in whatever region contains this setup. Now we add some more coal plants. They like to stay on. They hate turning off. What will happen is that the local baseline load rises to accommodate the greater supply of power. Also, the price of electricity will go down. It just isn't the case that the amount of power people consume within any given region is independent of the power supply to that region! The baseload is set by the amount of power being delivered; it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload". Almost any level will.

infamia 2mo ago
> it's logically incoherent to try to determine what level of inflexible power generation will meet "the baseload". Lots of folks don't know that coal and gas fired plants are able to turn down their power generation more than 90% (i.e., "ten to one turn down"). It's definitely true that cold restarts take a while. However, they often rather quickly and dramatically change their power output profile while running.
- 2mo ago

collinmcnulty 2mo ago

I think the lede is a bit buried here. The key point is that when renewables levelized cost is cheaper than the marginal cost of other sources (and I'll add, particularly when its below the fuel-only cost) the ability to economically displace those other sources is extremely strong.

hunterpayne 2mo ago

This article is largely non-scientific propaganda. LCOE is a fake stat that is never used to actually calculate any cost at any point. And anytime you use variable generation, you need to keep a spinning reserve, otherwise you get a blackout like what happened in Spain. HN should be ashamed to post such an article full of misinformation and half-truths not based on how engineering actually works.

teamonkey 2mo ago
You don’t need spinning reserve, but you do need enough reserve power that can supply grid-forming generation on demand. Batteries can react fast enough to peaks and troughs in voltage load, so long as there are enough of them where needed. Grid-forming batteries can react to frequency fluctuations electronically. Flywheels are another approach for grid stabilisation without a baseload.

slopinthebag 2mo ago

One thing I don’t understand is environmentalists seemingly unbounded hatred of nuclear energy. If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions and switch to clean energy, nuclear is a way to do that, but it seems like many of them would rather use coal (see Germany). I simply don’t understand this.

bluGill 2mo ago
You are not alone. There are a lot of people who have been confused since the 1970s. Even people who don't care about the environment have long recognized that hypocrisy.
cbsmith 2mo ago
...because they have other goals beyond reduce carbon emissions.
csb6 2mo ago
I think a lot of it was driven by the Chernobyl disaster, which was a massive environmental and health catastrophe. But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized.
- masklinn 2mo ago
  The environmentalist hatred for nukes long predates Chernobyl (if anything Chernobyl was an environmental boon by driving humans out of the zone). It started as a justified disapproval of nuclear tests (especially open air) and military nuclear, but then nuclear militaries made sone pointed remarks about the health and safety of a few beatniks going against the military-industrial complex, oil companies started fl funding groups, and voila civilian nukes are an environmental problem.
- throw0101d 2mo ago
  > But plants today are vastly safer than Chernobyl due to better design and processes, which I think anti-nuclear people haven't realized. Even other plants built in the same timeframe as Chernobyl are safer (not even getting to newer designs/builds), because in the West they were built with containment. The founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank isn't anti-nuclear: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-smoking-more-dangerous-radiation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...

jillesvangurp 2mo ago

Discussions about baseload are meaningless unless you can articulate how much of it we're talking about (in gw, gwh, and $). Most discussions about this topic completely skip over that. Technically, what grids mostly need now that we have a lot of intermittent producers and consumers of energy is not a lot of very inflexible generation (which is what baseload boils down to) but a lot of flexibility in the grid that can be switched on/off and is able to rapidly adapt to changing supply and demand. The grid doesn't need gas plants that are running 24x7 and burn a lot of expensive gas when there's more than enough power being generated through the day from wind and solar, which tends to be a lot cheaper. But because that's intermittent, you still need other sources of power. The traditional interpretation of that is "baseload" i.e. the stuff that used to provide most of our power (coal, nuclear, and gas). But in the last few years we have a new alternative: batteries. This grew from next to nothing a few years ago to hundreds of GW of capacity. Soon TWs. Batteries can smooth out the peaks and dips and switch from charging to discharging in a few milliseconds. You might still need some other power beyond that but now you can carefully plan when to bring backup power online and take it offline again once it is no longer needed. Modern gas plants can switch on and off relatively quickly and are very suitable for providing tha backup power. Modern coal and nuclear plants can do that as well but are just a lot less attractive due to their higher cost. And if you are not utilizing backup plants most of the time, their cost is really important. Power that is 1) very expensive, and 2) can't be switched off easily or cheaply, is kind of a the opposite of what is needed. That's what baseload amounts to. It's the exact opposite of what is needed. A thing that's often overlooked in discussions like this is cables. Cables can move power around. And interconnected grids like the European or Chinese grids make use of that to deal with highly localized peaks and dips in energy due to weather and daily and seasonal changes in availability of e.g. sunlight. An east west cable can time shift power in early morning and late evening. A north south cable can move solar power from places close to the equator to places further away from it. There are some cable projects being planned to connect Africa to Europe, Australia to Singapore, and Canada to Europe. Cables + batteries deflate a lot of the economical argument for needing baseload.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

effnorwood 2mo ago

Are your lights on? Mine are. In case you didn't know about my "phantom load".