This is an intriguing argument that the concept of "baseload power," which is always brought up as an obstacle to renewables, is largely a function of the way thermal plants operate and doesn't really apply any more:
Instead of the layered metaphor of baseload, we need to think about a tapestry of generators that weaves in and out throughout days and seasons. This will not be deterministic – solar and wind cannot be ramped up at will – but a probabilistic tapestry.
The system will appear messy, with more volatility in pricing and more complexity in long-term resource planning, but the end result is lower cost, more abundant energy for everyone. Clinging to the myth of baseload will not help us get there.
It's persuasive to me but I don't have enough knowledge to see if there are problems or arguments that he has omitted. (When you don't know alot about a topic, it's easy for an argument to seem very persuasive.)
"There's no such thing as baseload power"
byu/GraniteGeekNH inenergy
by GraniteGeekNH
19 comments
It’s not a myth, the concept is just changing. The utility I work at views the base load as their coal and nuke units. These are sold daily in the market.
Then renewables fill in the gap of this base baseload to meet demand. Any demand that is missed is met by gas units ramping up.
Ideally the end goal would be nuke plants and batteries serving as the base load, then having the renewable and gas system meet the rest of the demand.
This is true for most American utilities
I studied business, and looking at the grid with renewables reminds me a lot of making a stock portfolio. I wonder if the value of renewables projects can be decided not only by their generating capacity, but by how much they reduce “beta” or risk in the grid. So for example, if a location has wind at a time when the other renewables of the same size are off, it would be valued higher. The value could be in the marginal batteries that don’t need to be built because of that risk reduction.
Oh it’s very simple. Baseload power isn’t real and it is never needed. You do need firm, dispatch-able power but running a plant 100% of the time is NEVER required. And guess what? Almost no (possibly 0)plants in the U.S. run 100%. It’s just not a thing.
But if you’re an accountant, you like high utilization. It’s a financial preference not an energy one.
Baseload power is a term attributed to a constant load component required by the aggregate of the power demand curves. This is useful because certain kinds of generation have long startup and stop times + narrower modulation abilities, as with the usually identified kinds of power plants.
Grid stability hinges on the ability to match load and generation, so chaotic generation like with wind power and an periodic but not constant generation like with PV make it a requirement to have a generally massive energy storage capacity AND some kind of controllable peak generation capacity as we do now with gas (thinking they will all be closed is stupid, you will always need a backup).
I would say that having baseload plants isnt really mandatory. Baseload isnt a myth, theres a specific reason it exists as a concept, but it isn’t really the only way to get to a certain power generation.
Of course theres other things to consider in grid stability but this is the main point i think.
It’s literally in the word **baseload** not **base generation**. Baseload is the minium amount of power we need at any given time. Histoically, this has been met by plants running 24/7 (or close to that). But there’s nothing inherent to the energy system that it must be provided by the same plant at all times.
Baseload is largely just a contractual term.
If you agree to buy all the power from a plant ahead of time they cut you a deal.
Well, how much do you want to buy? Well you go back and basically look at what your minimum typical need is and buy that amount or so. You just found your “baseload” that you want to pre-buy to make it cheaper.
That’s all it is. It’s a way to figure out how to buy power cheaper. That’s all.
Isn’t it also party due to the rate structure that rewards consumers for using power at night? If the rate for power was lower in the middle of the day, because of solar, maybe there would be loads that would suddenly disappear from night and appear in day.
Possibly the most misused term in energy. it just means minimum demand, which usually happens overnight. It doesn’t make sense to say baseload is needed, not needed, or a myth. It’s a description of the demand profile, not a feature of generation. There is always a baseload.
What people are often thinking of is dispatchable generation, which can vary on demand to changing load, independent of weather. This is the opposite of both base and load.
The fact that some types of generation have traditionally covered baseload doesn’t mean that was a useful or essential function. It was just an economic way to run certain types of plant (those with high fixed costs). Plants which run this way are actually very unhelpful for dealing with renewable intermittency.
I’ve been saying this for YEARS. Baseload only really exists as a legacy of large power plants and the inability to really manage demand profiles of generation resources behind the meter.
Source: electrical engineer with a background in power and grid systems
Do water utilities have a baseload for water consumption (demand) and baseload water-level supply in water networks? I’d look at how other non-energy utilities operate.
Investor-owned energy utilities are completely cooked because they’ve realized that if baseload power doesn’t exist, both the generators and the networks are just sitting there with a ton of unused capacity. And of course, they care about that—how else are they supposed to inflate shareholder value?
The concept of ‘baseload power’ isn’t a blocker for renewables; it’s more of an enabler for thermal plants, which are only economical if they operate for a certain number of hours a day and maintain a minimum required level of operation (they can’t ramp down to zero). And, of course, this is all about IOU shareholder value. But the real question is—are those the actual enablers? You can easily replace thermal plants with batteries, and to improve IOU shareholder value, they just need to figure out how to best configure end-user rates. Honestly, people who argue that baseload power is needed have a pea-sized brain and don’t even understand why they’re pushing for it.
In a reneable heavy gird you don’t need baseload power. You need fast dispatchable power.
energy storage also changes this equation
Exactly. Baseload power sounds like 19th century electric power management technology.
One thing I never hear talked about is the role of the variable consumer. If power companies (like PG&E) had the phone numbers of all customers phones, they could text and say “it’s a good time to wash clothes” or “charge your home battery or Battery car”. With smart meters they could lower the rates as they have an abundance of solar, etc and tell people. They could text certain areas in a rotating way to not overload the system. I know they are thinking about, but maybe not there yet.
It’s not a myth until you have plenty of grid scale battery capacity.
A renewable source combined with battery storage can assume the role of baseload power. Coal fired plants can be replaced by solar or wind with battery storage. I don’t think the concept is dead quite yet.
Yes, a distributed network of batteries negates the need for a baseload.
This seems like an argument against nomenclature more than an argument against something tangible.
There will always be someone misusing a term like baseload or misunderstanding what it means and using it as an argument against something it doesn’t apply to.
There’s a minimum demand for power systems. That’s real, and an argument against that doesn’t make sense. We can’t just not have power at night, obviously. A bunch of second order effects have popped up as a consequence of the widely used methods of power generation (thermal), such as pricing discounts at night as a consequence of thermal plants ramping down lagging behind demand, and the reality that thermal plants are not viable to just turn off entirely every night.
If we were to collectively decide that we want to mostly use solar, and peak generation is midday, the market will adjust to that reality, because discounts will no longer be at night, they will be midday instead. However, any solution must still satisfy the minimum demand. If someone wants to call that minimum demand baseload, I think anyone reasonable can understand what that means.
One thing that isn’t accounted for in the idea of the “messy probabilistic tapestry” is that every probabilistic system has outliers. Thermal generation helps clip the worst edge of that curve. 5 days without wind in overcast conditions might be a 1/1000 or 1/10000 occurrence, but handling those outliers is an important part of a robust power grid. I think it’s likely that you always want to be able to account for all but the most extreme of those outlier situations with non-conditional generation. Blackouts of power grids literally kill people.
>First, it is true that there is a stable level of load that is basically always needed for a given region.
…Not feeling really encouraged to read the rest of the article
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