Baseline power is a concept suitable only to describe a grid that operates in a specific configuration (cheap slow stable source + expensive dispatchable source), but not in any way a principal requirement.
You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones).
If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
I think baseline means power plant that is always available, except for outages planned well in advance, and runs 24x7 at a given output. Generally baseline power doesn’t depend on the weather.
You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today.
I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.
Baseline power is slow to change. Not all always-available power is slow, thus not all is baseline. It is not even a desirable quality except for the associated low running costs.
To a large degree, storage is interchangeable with transport, so we would not necessarily need a lot of storage even if we wanted to disqualify sources other than wind and solar.
That being said, in long term, I think we will have a lot of storage and storage-equivalent in industrial chemical and technical processes once they switch to electricity, in consumer batteries (EVs), generally more flexible load, etc.
Baseline / baseload power sources not only is always available, but it is always generating as well, at a relatively constant output.
I would disagree that it is not a desirable quality.
Storage and transmission are interchangeable, both are expensive. I agree storage will win out since it is easier to build unless the transmission path is underwater.
Demand response will continue to generally be emergency reserves, since it means that there is power not being generated and consumed that could have been.
Peak shifting is viable, as long as my car is charged in the morning I don’t care when it happened - although how long do cars take to charge at home? There isn’t that much flexibility in there. I also don’t want my battery cycles used to provide $1 of electricity.
Exactly. Baseline power is a very poorly and loosely defined term that has no base in reality that people wield to argue against much cheaper renewable energy without actually providing any numbers. "we need unspecified amounts of nuclear, coal, and what not to deal with unspecified capacity loss for an unspecified number of days/months/years while some unspecified apocalyptic circumstances wipe out 100% of all solar and wind power on this planet. As soon as you start specifying any of that it becomes clear that is it pretty easily mitigated otherwise.
Wind power is rarely zero; certainly not everywhere. Solar of course is but at a rather predictable schedule, which is why it is often combined with battery and wind. If you can have extra energy generation, you can charge some batteries. The rest is just math related to how much energy generation and battery capacity you need.
I'm the author of the comment. The definition of base load:
The baseload[1] (also base load) on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week.
A renewable system has to meet this minimum demand too, otherwise the lights go out.
> The rest is just math related to how much energy generation and battery capacity you need.
I'm very pro-renewable, but aware of how difficult this is going to be. These are massive social and engineering tasks. For example, to look at the numbers in the UK, we're talking about construction of big new hydroelectric storage stations, or millions of batteries (potentially as EVs). [2]
The need for renewables to provide baseload power demand depends on big infrastructure development. Germany hasn't kept pace with this need, relying on French nuclear instead, which is why I said their Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
Baseline/baseload as the minimum you need to provide to meet demand over a period of time. [1]
The concept doesn't become irrelevant just because you're using renewables. Renewables still need to serve baseline power demand, through interconnection or storage.
They can't do this at the moment, and Germany is relying on countries with nuclear that provide this.
Your reinterpreted definition is misleading. If you have enough generation to serve baseload, you have enough to power a single instant over a week. You need to serve the entire load.
Germany may be importing energy, but more baseload generation is only one solution, and probably not even a particularly efficient one - you'd have a lot of leftover energy in peak times.
I elided a few words from the Wikipedia article, it is:
The baseload[1] (also base load) on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week.
It was unintentional to reinterpret the original sentence.
If I were to clarify my original comment, it would be to add I was referring to the concept "baseload/baseline demand", not "baseload generators". It's true you don't need baseload generators to meet the baseload demand.
My point was, as in the graph, Germany hasn't provided flexible backup to their renewables. They've relied on baseload nuclear generators from France being the backup.
To put it bluntly, if you have enough to power baseload, you have nothing, except maybe pitchforks in your face.
WRT baseload demand, I don't see how it's relevant to pretty much anything. Baseload power - I don't see how one would use it as a backup, unless you're throwing energy away, or it's variable, hence not baseload.
> To put it bluntly, if you have enough to power baseload, you have nothing, except maybe pitchforks in your face.
I don't know what you are saying here.
> WRT baseload demand, I don't see how it's relevant to pretty much anything.
The concept is relevant as renewables cannot currently provide baseload power demand without infrastructure that hasn't been built yet, ie. storage and interconnects.
> Baseload power - I don't see how one would use it as a backup, unless you're throwing energy away, or it's variable, hence not baseload.
Throughout this thread, you have continued to ignore that I have explained baseload power demand and baseload power generators are not the same concept.
Baseload power generators, as the Wiki article mentioned, traditionally provided baseload power demand, but there's no reason why baseload power demand needs to be met by baseload generators. Variable generators can provide baseload power demand:
Historically, most or all of baseload demand was met with baseload power plants, whereas new capacity based around renewables often employs flexible generation instead.[1]
"Baseload" is not shorthand for "baseload generator", but rather used to describe the minimum demand you need to meet without the lights going out.
> "Baseload" is ... minimum demand you need to meet without the lights going out.
No.
You need to meet all of the demand or you get blackouts / curtailment / power goes out. The least and smallest of the demand over a week is baseload. If you can only provide that, then you will have blackouts all of the time. And pitchforks in your face.
> [Germany] relied on baseload nuclear generators from France being the backup.
Baseload generators are pretty much fixed output (otherwise they wouldn't be called baseload generators). In what clever way do you expect to use a fixed output generator as a backup for your variable output generator?
Baseline power is a concept as long as you don't go for blackouts and utility-controlled demand (which can mean that no, you're not going to cook now, because there's not enough power).
Baseline is the floor of the demand for power. It doesn't disappear just because you don't have plants that can operate on schedule, it just becomes very expensive to mitigate the intermittent supply in absence of fairy magic storage and 10-25x overbuild in generation.
Do then I understand correctly, that if we have baseline power, from static output nuclear or whatever, then we don't need blackouts, controlled demand, and you can cook anytime because there is enough power?
As you say, baseline is the floor of the demand that holds everything else above (except the weekly instant with minimum demand that it merely matches).
Baseline power is essentially the lowest the demand ever goes to. I.e. at any point during a given schedule window, the demand does not go under that. Then you have peak power, which is the highs of demand.
The problem with lacking power plants that can provide stable scheduled power is that you then can't meet even that minimum, or peaks that happen outside of power generation peaks (While solar has happy correlation with daytime power usage, apparently the high peaks at least in Poland aren't when the solar output is highest, and wind tends in many areas to peak during the night).
Ultimately, what you want is supply synchronized with demand - and either you make supply side capable of following demand, or you need to start telling people there's no energy for whatever they need it for.
The benefit of having static power generation from nuclear power plants or whatever else is that we could then concentrate the storage to help the peaks, which is much easier and less resource intensive than trying to totally smooth out lack of predictably dispatchable power.
Also, in case you end up with not enough storage to cover peaks with renewables, it's much easier to have controlled demand from big industrial power sinks provide the latitude to respond to peak demand rather than find out you don't have enough power for the base minimum pretty much all the time and have to institute rolling blackouts on unpredictable schedule.
> Ultimately, what you want is supply synchronized with demand
Agree. We need to provide this, with allowances from inter-region transport, storage and acceptable demand shifting.
In fact, average generation must match average consumption (+losses) over storage timeframe. Peak demand dictates what generation (+ storage) is needed, at that time. Nondeferrable demand - unschedulable generation dictates how much schedulable generation (+ storage) you need.
Minimum demand dictates ... how much static generation can you use without throwing away energy or using storage, but you want to use storage, so you can use more, and you want to use solar/wind so you need to subtract that, and now we're getting quite disconnected baseline demand, so I really don't see the point of baseline power.
Another way of thinking about "baseline" power is that is produces power 24/7. Energy demand fluctuates a lot during the day[1]. Cheap, reliable sources of energy serve as a "baseline", and additional "peaker" plants spin up to serve the spikes in demand during the day.
Solar and wind are unreliable power sources. That is OPs point - you can't compare nuclear and solar kw for kw because they are not the same. Nobody has near enough storage to allow solar to be treated as a 24/7 reliable power source.
I know the theory; the practice is different though: plenty of places doing just fine on solar, wind, and battery.
Wind still blows at night though. And if you install a bit more than you need, you can deal with temporarily reduced local capacity as well. And with the cost savings, 2x or 3x is entirely feasible (but probably overkill). And if you use interconnected grids like this article talks about, it's always going to be windy somewhere and you can add remote solar setups, hydro, batteries, etc. to the mix. Batteries alone remove most of the need for expensive gas peaker plants in a lot of places already. Interconnecting a diversity of solutions provides plenty of base load and resilience. Texas could have uses some when their baseload providing gas, coal, and nuclear failed them last winter.
The issue I have with "base load" is that it's a very fuzzy term that seems to be rarely specified in GW. As soon as you do that or specify the amount of time you need to bridge with that capacity, the relevant unit becomes GWH. Which of course is a common unit of storage and energy production. Plenty of ways to provide large quantities of that sustainably; and people already do in many ways. It's just a function of cost and engineering proper solutions. It's not even that expensive mostly. Especially compared to building nuclear power plants.
> plenty of places doing just fine on solar, wind, and battery.
Do you have more information about this?
I've seen lots of claims about "X city/country is running on 100% renewables", but these are always talking about net numbers. i.e. they produce enough renewable energy to power themselves if they had the storage, but they don't. They still import fossil fuel electricity when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
Indeed, lots of people have the concept of base load as qualitatively different kind of electricity lodged in their mental model too firmly. Electricity consumers expect it because suppliers have provided it for a long time.
Baseline is a hard political requirement. The alternative is just turning people’s power off when there isn’t enough sunshine. Literally no electable party will make that choice; it’s electoral suicide. They’ll all choose to produce power with coal before they’ll choose to turn their citizens lights off.
The grid could use intermittent sources + storage and the lights never need to go off. And it can be cheaper than coal (w. associated environmental costs) or nuclear, especially with projected cost declines.
First, this is still baseline power, it’s just coming from batteries. The imperative to always keep the power on remains, but there are several ways to do it from an engineering perspective.
Second, we’re not there yet. Until we have enough batteries to cover that, baseline will need to be provided by some other form of power generation. Currently this is natural gas (America) and coal (almost everywhere else). On the balance I think it would be best for us all if it was nuclear until we have enough grid level storage to make this discussion moot.
Third, if you interpreted my comment as anti-renewables then you misread me. Renewables are great, I have them on my house, but it’s important to acknowledge that always keeping the power on is a political reality. We need to engineer around that requirement for now, and hopefully one day that’ll be trivial for renewables.
So .. if we plot the electricity demand curve, baseline would be a level line going through the (weekly) bottom of the curve. Baseline power is below the line and the rest is above, correct?
Renewables and more specifically storage is not ready, so the part that is below base line is currently served by gas (and some coal/nuclear) and the part that is above is delivered by renewables without need for storage?
Yes. Baseline is essentially the line below which demand doesn't drop.
A problem with renewables is that they still need storage to work as peakers, because in many places renewable production doesn't happen in peak times.
So, is below baseline powered by gas and coal? If so, why? Wouldn't it make more sense to cover as much as you can with renewables, including as much below and above the baseline, then cover the rest with gas for now and HVDC/storage/demand shifting/.. later?
I.e. calculate demand - renewables. Cover that. Don't see the point of baseline.
You do realize that every country is already doing what you are suggesting? The point however is that unreliable renewables doesn't cover anything at all reliably, so you need reliable power to cover 100% of demand or you will have regular blackouts. You can achieve that by having enough battery storage to fuel the whole country for months to last the whole winter, or you build reliable power plants like nuclear, coal or gas. We aren't even close to having the battery solution even within decades, so the only alternative are the unrenewable power plants.
And no, betting on a good winter isn't a solution. If those batteries runs out and large swathes of the country blacks out for months during a cold winter many will die. That is not a good solution.
Using batteries to get renewables to 100% is bad systems engineering. It's cheaper to use something like hydrogen for the last 10-20%, and for seasonal load leveling.
If you notice, you have mentioned baseload, baseload power generation, baseload demand or base-anything exactly 0 times, because it has near 0 relevance, which is the point of the entire discussion.
> So .. if we plot the electricity demand curve, baseline would be a level line going through the (weekly) bottom of the curve. Baseline power is below the line and the rest is above, correct?
Correct.
> the part that is below base line is currently served by gas (and some coal/nuclear) and the part that is above is delivered by renewables without need for storage?
Pretty close, but a bit of an over simplification.
Exactly what percentage of the grid is renewables at any given moment depends on the installed ("nameplate") capacity of various generation sources, and their mix. Even today it's not uncommon for the vast majority of a grid's demand to be met by renewables for short periods of time. The issue is that we can't do it reliably enough yet.
Some sources of power are very slow to change their production (coal, nuclear), and therefore are designed to produce constantly[0]. If your grid has a lot of these, then your description above will be correct; your baseload plants will produce a constant level of power with renewables and imports handling demand spikes above that need.
On the flip side, if your grid has a lot of natural gas or hydro, then you can spin these up and down to cover the difference between what your consumers want and what your renewables are creating (plus or minus big industrial loads that can be shed on demand). Batteries fit into this category, and theoretically a grid with a ton of batteries wouldn't need anything other than sufficient renewables and batteries to meet demand.
Until such a time that we have enough batteries to make a fully renewable grid possible, your grid must have a mix of nuclear, coal, or natural gas[1] to keep the lights on.
For a direct illustration, consider California's mix right now. If you read carefully you'll notice that nuclear and coal power remains extremely flat in CA (16MW and 1140MW or so respectively), while natural gas and unspecified imports tend to move in inverse correlation to the amount of power generated by renewables. If the renewable production were bigger, it possibly would have eclipsed demand mid day and enabled the export or shutdown of that Coal power. On the flip side you also have to note that currently solar power is dropping off in CA right as demand is spiking. A true renewable grid would need enough batteries to provide 26,000 MW of capacity or so for for hours, plus enough renewables to cover demand + charging. It's doable, but it'll take time.
Also, right now CA is producing a mere 459MW worth of energy from its grid scale batteries, which is roughly 1/3rd of what CA's one nuclear power plant provides. They're planning on shutting this plant down, rather than building new ones.
0 - Confusingly these are called "baseload power plants".
1 - Or hydro, but that's really region dependent. The power coming from the utility company here is 42% Hydro, but that's because I live in a mountain state.
Batteries are for diurnal leveling. You don't need 24 hour storage for diurnal leveling.
For long term or rare event storage, something like hydrogen will likely be cheaper. Efficiency is lower, but that's a good tradeoff to get lower per-kWh-capacity cost.
We're still a long way from diurnal leveling though. Currently CA's battery output can't even match a single nuclear reactor; it's currently outputting 459MW to Diablo Canyon's 1,140MW.
You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones).
If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.