[anon7725]

Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?

At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.

Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.

And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.

[bryanlarsen]

"Baseload" is load, not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling.

Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.

China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.

Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.

P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"

[rayiner]

> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night

That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.

[bryanlarsen]

Note that China has started building battery banks at massive scale recently.

[eldaisfish]

Is china building new coal plants or not?

Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?

The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.

[bryanlarsen]

> Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?

Because it was only in 2025 that batteries became cheaper than coal, so the lead times involved mean they are still building coal.

They're very rapidly ramping up battery bank installation, it's too early to tell if they're also ramping down coal plant installations, but it seems likely.

[eldaisfish]

china has confirmed building new coal plants until at least 2030.

[dalyons]

The increased demand is absolutely and categorically not being met by coal. Look it up, chinas total coal emissions have declined the last few years, despite overall demand growth.

It’s being entirely met by renewables.

[eldaisfish]

i strongly suggest you look this up before making claims like this. Nearly 60% of china's electricity demand in 2025 was met by coal generation.

[chairmansteve]

It's probably because they have a lot of coal and not much natural gas.

[tcfhgj]

we don't need reliable "base load" but peakers - with more renewables more than ever.

Baseload won't be price competitive with renewables in average or shiny/windy conditions ever

[well_ackshually]

you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)

Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.

[bryanlarsen]

> You need both

Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.

It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.

[zchrykng]

How much do those batteries cost and can they supply power for multiple days or a season if your renewable sources aren't providing like normal?

Not to mention the environmental damage from producing and disposing of batteries.

[tcfhgj]

I agree, there are better options for mass scale long term energy storage than batteries, e.g. (green) hydrogen, methane

[bryanlarsen]

Pumped hydro is currently the cheapest long term energy storage by a significant amount.

[well_ackshually]

"Why do you need both, it's possible with technologies we don't have at scales we don't control with predictions weeks ahead on a rapidly changing and unpredictable weather model"

Yeah, uh, I'm going to go with the "building a nuclear plant is the safest solution" answer, thanks. Technosolutionism is fun up to a certain point.

>It's possible to get 99.99% reliability [...] It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid

Notwithstanding the fact that lol you're happily saying that you're perfectly fine you get 1 hour of complete downtime every year, which fucks over many industries and services, you're ignoring multiple facts: 1/ to ensure safety, that means rolling brownouts when you're at 95% capacity, great solution, 2/ 99.99% works exactly like it does in software: you don't get tiny seconds long drops, you get gigantic, energy grid collapsing catastrophic failures, that are impossible to restart, grid sync because every renewable island is isolated.

>It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability

What kind of incompetent country are you living in? I have had exactly ZERO minutes of power outages for the past 5 years. I'll be generous and include the 30 minutes of downtime for maintenance. The country wide average blackout time is 2m30s, .43 power cuts / person / year. That's 99.996% stability country wide, and that's heavily weighted down by the places that get fucked by a tree collapsing on a transformer station

[MakersF]

The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.

When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.

When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.

Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.

So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.

[bryanlarsen]

Per Ember Energy reports, a cost optimal new build grid is between 90% - 97% solar/wind/battery, and between 3% to 10% gas peaker depending on how much sun/wind your locale gets.

But you can't replace the gas peaker with 3% or 10% nuclear because in essence that gas peaker is supplying 100% of the power 3% to 10% of the time.

So you'd have to build nuclear plants that can supply 100% of the power. But once you have that you might as well use nuclear power 100% of the time because the rest is irrelevant. But that's about as far from cost-optimal as you can get.

As you mentioned, using batteries for seasonal storage is madness. So to get to 100% carbon free you have at least 2 other options:

1. use a different form of seasonal storage. China is experimenting with this. In 2026 they will double the world's pumped hydro storage capacity. But doubling isn't a lot -- the world doesn't have much pumped hydro. But it does mean they might start doing it at China scale in a few years.

2. Overbuild to avoid the need for seasonal storage. Solar works on cloudy days and in the winter. It just doesn't work very well. So you need a lot of it. Which is expensive, but still a heck of a lot cheaper than batteries for seasonal storage.

In reality, most places will probably say that 95% or 99% carbon reduction is good enough and keep their backup natural gas generators around for the occasional dankelflaute.

[eldaisfish]

every single one of Ember's analyses are based on historical situations. That is certainly useful, and serves to demonstrate an important point - that wind and solar make economic sense.

There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate.

You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.

This is exactly where nuclear shines, because although it is expensive, it insulates a country against the vagaries of external forces. Whether or not that guarantee is worth the price tag is the question a lot of governments are grappling with and they mostly seem to agree that the value is indeed worth the cost.

[Tepix]

No. Nuclear is neither price competitive, nor is it available quick enough.

Go fully renewable. Add batteries, like Google is doing. Just one example: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/24/google-to-deploy-worl...