Re:Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
by jerven on Sunday April 04, 2021 @09:45AM
(#26689331)
Baseload tends to be about 40% of max load in most grids. i.e. having base production doesn't really change the economics of storage or over-provisioning etc. On the other hand because there is always, in this theoretical grid 60% overproduction potential your base load has real difficulty making money about 1/3rd of the time.
Baseload, is really minimal load in the grid. There are many ways to produce the minimal amount. Real difficult part is to provide the max load demand on the grid.
Basically current nuclear technology is inflexible in economic terms (also quite a bit in practical terms), shown historically by most grid storage being deployed when nuclear was being built out.
That's what baseload is.
> Renewables sometimes produce pretty close to 0 energy.
Which is why they need storage, and storage is expensive. If you do half nuclear and half renewables, you only need half as much storage.
Less than half, because you can use pricing to shift demand.
Suppose you have 50 GW of nominal demand, but solar generation is at 10% of normal because it's overcast. You can get demand down to 40GW through price incentives. If you had 50 GW of solar which is down to 5 GW, you would need to cover 35 GW from storage. If you had 25 GW of solar which is down to 2.5 GW, and 25 GW of nuclear, you only have to cover 12.5 GW from storage. Less than half as much.