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> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation. Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times. Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars. In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era. |
This is what I'm questioning though, 30 years of hand waving about "base load", and all the stories about how renewables aren't sufficient, but then, oh wait, actually, we can probably do it now.
Maybe, just maybe the tech wasn't there, but it is convenient that when push comes to shove, we do have the technology. If the investment was there 30 years ago, it feels like we could've made a lot more progress. But the narrative persisted.