The UK has Dinorwig Power Station which is a pumped storage hydro station to supply spot demand when it's time for tea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

But at the end of the day, it uses more energy than it generates due to the inefficiencies of pumping water up to the top of the mountain (basically, it's playing arbitrage with spot electricity pricing & demand).

By hydro i did not mean pumped storage hydro but ordinary dam hydro. It does not technically store energy but it is a very effective on demand power producer because you can turn it on or off at will (provided there is enough water in the reservoir).

Also, it is very good for intermittent generation, because when you stop it, you can fill up the water in the reservoir and give yourself potential energy for the next time you start it up. It does in a way store energy, it stores the energy of rivers, not of electricity.

Of course whether you can access it depends on your environment. You have to have convenient rivers to dam up, and you have to have no water shortages. In a case of water shortage the decision to let water out or not is usually made based on water needs, not electricity needs.

Hydro has very specific geographical requirements and in countries like Germany, all almost all potential for hydro power has already been put to use and yet it provides only a fraction of the electricity generation here.

Hydro only plays a large role world-wide in countries with low population densities such as Norway.

The geographical requirements are way too big for hydro, destroys nature, the possibility of disasters.

> I don't see why we need this so called baseline. It is an outdated concept pushed by the nuclear industry.

That’s a lie spread by the renewables lobby.

Of course, there is always a certain level of electricity generation that is needed as most people like to use their fridges, AC and computers 24/7.

And then you have things like traffic infrastructure, hospitals, gas stations which operate 24/7.

I don’t know about the US, but in Germany only 25% of the electricity is consumed by private households, 75% by industry, traffic and businesses.

The result is that in Germany the demand never goes below 50 GW and normally peaks at around 75-80 GW. The demand function pretty much oscillates like a sine function.

> Of course, there is always a certain level of electricity generation that is needed as most people like to use their fridges, AC and computers 24/7.

This is true but let me summarise my understanding which might be incorrect, and is based off this article and similar ones. I'd like to know where it's wrong?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-10-12/renewable-ene...

Basically, there is a minimum amount of power a traditional power plant can generate before needing to turn off, which is slow and costly.

"Base load" is this minimum amount that is generated onto the grid and it is priced accordingly at off-peak times so demand will increase and consume it without power stations losing money by burning fuel to waste power, or having to turn off.

With renewables in the picture, they eat into this base load demand. Now when demand is lower, renewables might still be outputting power at little to no marginal cost, and homes are not pulling from the grid. The traditional plants are burning fuel but they have to sell it at a loss or dump the power (maybe batteries can help them here).

This means that, as we get more and more renewable sources online, traditional plants are actually bad for base load (in the modern use of the term) generation. A lot of the time they can't come online fast enough to fill a slump if renewables drop, which means they are idling and losing money the rest of the time when renewables are flourishing. This means we need rapid response sources, like batteries (seconds) or gas (tens of minutes) rather than the traditional sources (coal) which take hours.

There is one additional factor which is used in practice. Fossil fueled plants like those operation on oil can get paid to operate in backup mode. I know plants here in Sweden does this, and I suspect it is either tax funded directly or by the grid connection cost that get added on top of the metered cost.

This way a traditional fossil fueled power station get paid to maintain capacity regardless of current demand, and the response time is kept low in case of changing weather.

From the perspective of the government, they are simply paying for a reliable power grid. From the perspective of renewable energy plants, they can sell energy at a lower price than fossil fueled power plants with smaller investment. From the perspective of the fossil fueled power plant they get paid twice, once for being backup and then any power they then happen to sell when the price goes up because of the weather. From the perspective of capacity, both renewable and fossil fueled power plants tries to have capacity close to 100% of demand and thus get invested and built accordingly.

From my own perspective I am not sure this is the cleanest, most stable or cheapest way to run a power grid.

It sounds basically like paying someone to be "on call" in case you need them in a hurry. That does seem like more of a bandage over the existing system rather than an optimal design.

It is but there are not many alternatives. Government are investing into more power lines at the border in order to import energy from nearby countries fossil fueled energy plants. If we look at the region as a whole however, the fossil fueled energy capacity still need to match the whole grid and the owners of those plants will need to be paid.

Hydro power is a great alternative, but we are already at peak utilization. We actually need to tear down some in order to save red listed species and restore the environment for animals that need to have unobstructed rivers to reproduce. As the capacity has been increasing, hydro power has been mostly static in term of growth.

There is nuclear and the political situation of that. The government and the green party (who is part of the current government constellation) are promoting the "on call" as a favorable strategy over nuclear. Their main political argument is that everything is good as long we produce more green energy over the whole year than we consume coal energy during the winter. Historically the political right has been pro-fossil fuels, but given the current situation there has been some movement now where some parties is looking to move into opposition.

And last we got battery technology. So far the only installations that I know globally that operate by generating solar energy and putting them into battery is Tesla. I don't know how economical that system has been. There exist to my knowledge no wind park operating through Tesla batteries, and I do not know why that is.

What you are saying is true but irrelevant. Yes there is a baseline of demand. But that does not mean that there is a requirement for a similar supply. The demand you described can be supplied by cheap renewables, complemented by gas or hydro as I discussed above.