[hdgvhicv]

What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.

I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.

[Closi]

I'm just going on the fact that most energy experts say a diversified mix is what you usually want - although my lay assumption would be that if you have a portion of your energy need covered by a stable base load, you need less batteries per wind turbine etc and it lowers overall energy risk.

e.g. lets pick two overly-simplified hypothetical scenarios where you can have a 50/50 nuclear/wind mix, or 100% wind mix.

And then lets say in a shortage scenario you can: - Suppress demand / demand shift (say you can reduce/shift demand 10% hypothetically)

- Import energy, up to 20% of your total requirement

In this simple scenario, in a 100% wind scenario, you would need to cover 60% of your energy need with batteries (every 1% of wind needs 0.6% of batteries), but in the 50/50 mix scenario the 50% of wind only needs to cover 10% with batteries (i.e. every 1% of wind needs 0.2% of batteries)

In reality there will be other things, like you might also have burst-gas power etc.

I'm not saying the numbers above are correct - just trying to show in theory that a mix / base load can still help reduce the level of batteries/storage required and make the energy mix more economic.