As load following for wind?

Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult.

Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return.

So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two.

*(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)

Getting full power from a nuclear plant has negligible fuel costs, so it's good to stay at 100% and use the power somehow, but that doesn't mean they're bad at load-following. A plant made with load-following in mind can go between half power and full power in minutes.

Nuclear, yes, but hydro, no. Hydro simply isn’t scalable, once you build out practical sites, you cannot get more of it. This is doubly true in flat and dry places like Texas.

I might nitpick and point out that Texas is not flat and dry. It is flat and wet, or dry and hilly. East Texas has the swamps and weather patterns of the traditional gulf southern states. West Texas has mountains higher than anything on the east coast of the US. The rockies don't just dead end in northern NM, there are sky islands and mountain ranges extending all the way down through Mexico. Central Texas has a bit of both, but the water situation is unreliable enough that while there are a fair number of dams and reservoirs with hydroelectric very little of it is used consistently for electric generation. That is because the water value in the reservoir exceeds its electric generation value. Those dams were built mostly for flood control, so they get hammered every couple years and end up opening spillways, then slowly dropping for years as the remaining water gets used up. The hydro only really takes effect when they are sending water from one lake down to the next for water control purposes.

There is still a lot of hydro potential left in the US. And there is no generation should be anywhere near that centralized.

I think I worded my point poorly. Nuclear and Hydro can provide great low emission baselines, but if you're building up a large percentage of your grid on solar and wind you need something which can very quickly ramp up and ramp down generation. Nuclear's costs means that it would be far better to have be a consistent baseline running at full capacity.

In that case simply don't use that much wind or hydro. It seems that the costs outweigh the benefits when hydro and nuclear are so cheap and provide such low emissions.

Either that, or structure the grid so that wind and solar are used to power accumulative loads.