[leccine]

You still need a base power plant and few others for controlling the amount of energy in the system. Using only renewable is kind o hard. If we can figure out a way to store energy the way we can access it very quickly with arbitrary output, we could move on to renewables exclusively.

[jerven]

No we need to be able to shed unwanted power. Generation using renewable sources can be over provisioned, and still be economically feasible. Power usage fluctuations are thé key issue to manage. As wind is a very good base load provider.

Don't look at capacity factor that is very misleading.

[schainks]

> As wind is a very good base load provider.

What? Please show us where the wind blows 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year.

Not being a nay-sayer, but your comment is very misleading.

"Good base load provider" means high availability - reliable enough so the lights don't go out. When's the last time you remember a power outage in the US that did not make the news? Yeah, that kind of availability. Outages are rare enough that they make the news when they do happen. Right now, wind cannot provide this kind of "base load" guarantee unless we overbuild a huge amount of capacity and implement a very sophisticated real-time system to manage all the inputs/outputs, and even then you'll be lucky to generate stable baseline load. China's trying right now and having a very difficult time both delivering stable power, and making money doing it[1].

[1] http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1171987/analysis---c...

[jerven]

What is base load? Its the minimum load required in a network or is it those plants for whom it is uneconomical to go below a certain output.

For the first no power plant is truly base load as all plants must shutdown sometimes. So you need to look at a system. So taking into account that in a large area like California it always blows some where, can wind generate the minimal base load at any time. For wind the law of large numbers eventually means that given a per wind turbine capacity factor of 36% a pure wind net achieves 36% capacity factor. If the 36% is the day peak load, then at 18% you are at night low load, considering that wind can be base load.

On the second base load is pump it when you got it e.g. because it costs to much to ramp down (coal, nuclear) or because you got the power anyway (wind, day/noon solar) then yes wind is base load.

Single wind turbines are not base load power plants, but when you have thousands of them over a large area they start to guarantee with high accuracy a minimal load with very good prediction properties.

Of course this ignores economic efficiency, but that depends very much on oil prizes.

e.g. The us uses 18 million barrels of oil a day. That means the yearly oil consumption of the US is very roughly equivalent to the volume of oil required to flood Rhode island state one foot deep. Which on the face of it does not seem economically efficient but at the moment it is.