Baseload Power Debate

You cannot power up solar panels at night, or wind turbines when there's no wind.As for nuclear, you don't need to stop them. Instead they provide a base load so you don't need to ridiculously overprovision other power sources. And they are flexible enough to go 50%-100% quickly: <a href="https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf" rel="nofoll

Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load".Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or batteries.With renewables the production capacity is

There is no set rule that says you need to get x% of your power from a stable "base load" producer. In many regions of the US you could cover daily demand using a dynamic combination of wind, solar, hydro, and natural gas. The base load power story has been pushed by coal/nuclear advocates to try to maintain skepticism about renewables.In reality, power sources that have little to no flexibility in power output (coal and nuclear) are not ideal either. They either produce at nea

No, nuclear is actually not that great for that. You need a power source that is cheap to scale up to cover discrepancies between supply and demand. If you build nuclear capacity for that you might as well just run it all the time and not build renewables. Nuclear has very small marginal costs, but huge up front capital expenses. You really don't want to run it at 10% load most of the year to cover the times where neither the sun shines not the wind blows.

Nuclear can provide base load. Battery tech or other storage options are nowhere near developed/scalable enough to do that. Solar and wind always needs natural gas or similar as a backup.

Yes, but the point is that the problem is isomorphic to wind or solar: you get power when you don't want it. So nuclear isn't backstopping any particular need, it has the same drawbacks. The reason gas plants are used as peaker plants is that they can be turned on and off more or less instantly.

There is no requirement that the grid requires "baseload" sources of power. The grid can operate with flexible sources of power that can ramp (gas, some hydro, etc.) in addition to wind and solar. If anything nuclear and coal, which can only run at 80-100% capacity or 0% capacity are inconvenient and inflexible sources of power.The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!

myth?you can turn on a nuclear reactor anytime you want, but not a solar panel/wind turbine. that is what baseload is about.

That's the whole point of nuclear, hydro or coal though, they need to be run at high capacity to be economically viable, have long spin up and down times and are costly to maintain. You use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary, less batteries needed as the base load can always be delivered by nuclear/hydro. Coal is basically dead in the next decade or so.

Nuclear produces constant amount of energy (while consumption is not stable), Solar and Wind are highly unstable, with peaks not matching consumption. Adding gas (which is fast to adjust/turn on/turn off) for maneuvers makes whole system cheaper and more stable