[chris_va]

(disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group)

Most of the comments here are speculative.

The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).

[mrDmrTmrJ]

Given that renewable power power is self correlated (all the solar panels are producing at once - or they’re not, all the wind turbines are turning at once - or they’re not) - renewable energy leads to low prices when it’s produced and high prices when it’s not.

Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?

[pfdietz]

Batteries are also highly useful for relaxing transmission constraints. I've seen a claim that sufficient storage (at various places in the network) could increase the energy transmittable over the existing grid by a factor of 3.

An analogy here is natural gas pipelines with intermediate storage caverns, which allow the pipelines to operate more steadily even if demand various greatly over the year.

[jabl]

> Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?

Even better, if you have a functioning wholesale electricity market, you can put those batteries on the grid and benefit everybody.

[not2b]

No, because as the parent comment suggests, if you have solar+wind backed by natural gas and battery storage, if the battery storage isn't enough the natural gas plants can quickly fire up. But coal plants don't have this ability, so it doesn't work as well in this environment (which is today's environment).

[soni96pl]

Once you have batteries you may do so with solar or wind

[ericd]

Yeah, but sometimes the intermittency is pretty extreme, and you can get away with significantly less overpaneling and storage if you have a mix of power sources. Not many experts advocate for 100% renewables.

[pfdietz]

Right; batteries aren't really suitable for the low frequency part of the supply/demand mismatch. Daily storage, great, perhaps up to 1 week, but lower frequencies they are increasingly expensive.

But there are other storage ideas that do much better for that. For example, burning an e-fuel like hydrogen, or ultra low capex thermal storage.

[robocat]

> neither can nuclear

Nuclear can load follow to some extent (my previous comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254716

But regulations and economics don't encourage it. Also note that NuScale appears to be designed to be dispatchable