[rsynnott]

Wind most certainly isn't base load. It's highly weather dependent. Occasionally, Ireland's wind infrastructure produces the country's entire electricity demand, and they actually have to start shutting down wind turbines. Also occasionally the whole system only produces a couple of hundred megawatts for a period of about a week.

There are some locations with very reliable constant wind (though usually only for part of the year) but that's not the norm. Offshore wind does better, but is still far from base load.

[luca_ing]

> Wind most certainly isn't base load.

The German government's scientific service, for one, disagrees with you.

[rsynnott]

Do you have a link to an article on this? My impression was that Germany was trying to move away from base load as a concept entirely, using unreliable renewables plus highly responsive fossil plants instead.

[luca_ing]

Here's the link: http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/untersuchungen/u140.html

It being a German government publication it's in German unfortunately.

As far as I can tell from skimming it your impression is correct.

So I apparently misremembered the article, and my claim about base load a few posts above may be incorrect after all. Sorry, rsynnott.

[0xfeba]

They moved away from Nuclear. However, now they import power from France, etc. Which has Nuclear and fossil fuel plants.

[luca_ing]

In 2016, Germany was a net exporter of electrical energy: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...

However you're right that Germany was a net importer from (among others) France: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/180862/umfrag...

Which is surprising as I remember reading that France has tremendous difficulties satisfying their electricity demand, especially in winter (lots of electric heating apparently).