[liketochill]

Colour me confused, a nuclear power plant the operators can choose how much power they make every day and generally choose as much as possible, a wind farm they can set a limit for the maximum power generated but the actual power generated could be anywhere from zero to the set maximum depending on the wind speed.

nuclear is more often considered baseload generation as opposed to dispatchable but wind is not baseload or dispatchable since it is not possible to control the wind speed.

[pydry]

>a nuclear power plant the operators can choose how much power they make every day

No. They cant.

It takes 24-48 hours for them to ramp production up or down and this is both expensive and difficult. This is far too slow to be useful. Natgas takes ~7 seconds-minutes to go from 0-100% and it's cheap and easy. Same for batteries. Hydro is slower but still in the order of minutes/seconds. This IS useful.

When nuclear plants have claimed ramp up/down speeds quicker than that they are always still producing the same amount of energy at the same cost they are just wasting some of it.

The nuclear industry tries to blur these distinctions.

>but wind is not baseload or dispatchable since it is not possible to control the wind speed.

Wind can often pull the same "trick" nuclear does where if the grid only wants 100MW but it's producing 150MW it can just let 50MW go to waste.

This isnt really "dispatchable" either but sometimes wind energy advocates pull the same trick.

[liketochill]

Wind farms can’t plan to make 100 MW or 150 MW or 50 MW on Tuesday next week if there is no wind.

Nuclear can.

I agree nuclear isn’t dispatchable, natural gas is. But wind is not dispatchable nor is it baseload so making a comparison to nuclear and pretending there is firm energy out of a wind farm on a given day is false to me.

[pydry]

>Wind farms can’t plan to make 100 MW or 150 MW or 50 MW on Tuesday next week if there is no wind.

Once again, nobody said it could.