| > And I never said we don't need baseload anymore, I said, and that is confirmed by grid operators, studies So far we only have your word for it > and first habd knowldge And this is your word. That's it. The rest I really don't care about because I'm just as capable of writing plausible-sounding walls of text without a single link to a study or a statistic. I try not to do that. > that demand, and there only big consumers matter Ah yes. Only big consumers. We've increased our electricity requirements 5-fold, but that doesn't matter. The "big consumers" will halt their production when there isn't enough electricity. > We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are unpredictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes I'd say often > almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that The grid can mitigate it if there's a stable baseload generation available. A month ago there was a day when all of Europe's wind and solar combined was producing something like 10% of installed capacity. Saved by copious amounts of coal burning (and also by nuclear and some hydro). So, riddle me this: when there isn't enough renewable energy, do "big consumers" halt their production, or the electricity consumption remains the same? And what does this tell you about "we don't require as much baseload anymore", given that our electricity requirements have grown 500% in the past 40 years? |
If there isn't enough solar and wind (hydro and other green / renewable electricity sources are perfectly base load capable), yes, large consumers reduce their consumption for that period. So, in percentage and not absolute values (no surprise you don't get that difference, you don't get neither the electricity has to he consumed when produced and production / consumption lives on a time scale...), we need less base load generation then previously. Heck, even Germany, among other countries, had days with > 80% renewable electricity on the grid, so we know it is technically absolutely possible.
Coal is bad, agree. Nuclear is a great stop gap until everything is ready, grid, capacity, industry and the like, to function with a renewable epectricity grid. Building new NPPs is a dead end so: too expensive, takes too much time and gets nowhere near the additional capacity we need, since most new NPPs replace old ones the net nuclear capacity gain is negligible.
The grid can mitigate if somwhere on the grid sufficient electricity is produced, base load, nuclear, renewables or somethibg else doesn't matter. Throw in demand flexibility and you are almostv here already. Storage is lacking, but even that is built out, e.g. most new residential PV has some storage component.
And since you insist: Yes, big consumers absolutely do stop production if needed and financially interesting. Know what? They even schedule production accordingly in close alignmwnt with electricity markets and grid operators. Hard to believe, I know.
Edit: I know big consumers do stop or scale down production, because my wife does so in production planning every week. And I scheduled production runs the same way during my time in production planning in the chemical industry. Oh, and one of the green belt projects I coached looked for ways to optimize production runs to enable more and more short notice shut downs for limited periods. The last one happened over ten years ago.