There's not a 'baseload problem', there's a 'supply meeting demand problem'. And nuclear and renewables are not a good combination to solve that problem, because they don't complement each other at all: what both would need to efficiently supply the grid is either lots of storage or highly dispatchable cheap generation. The former is being developed and the latter exists but is still fossil fuels. The other option is massive overbuilding, which is far more doable with renewables because they're so cheap.

Who’s foreign funding the nationalist greens world-wide?

Bet it someone with oil money. SA or Ruskies

Baseload: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

Isn't battery storage the baseload solution for renewable power? And it doesn't have to be lithium batteries, there are cheaper alternatives if you don't need the batteries to be that small.

Battery manufacturing, at least with the chemistries we have available right now, won't scale to the point where we can store several weeks worth of power in the foreseeable future. Afaik Power2Gas is the only currently available technology that can be scaled relatively quickly. Most countries already have the infrastructure for strategic gas reserves.

Why would you need to store several weeks worth of energy?

> Most countries already have the infrastructure for strategic gas reserves. Some do. Some that you might think would, do not, UK for instance.

"The Rough storage facility in the North Sea, owned by British Gas owner Centrica, provided 70% of the UK gas storage capacity for more than 30 years before it shut in 2017 following a government decision not to subsidise the costly maintenance. ... The UK’s stores hold enough gas to meet the demand of four to five winter days, or just 1% of Europe’s total available storage. The Netherlands has capacity more than nine times the UK’s, while Germany’s is 16 times the size."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...

You would want to store several weeks of energy so that you're prepared for once in a decade windstill cloudy freezing winter months without people freezing to death in their homes. How many weeks depends on how well your grid is interconnected and how much you've overprovisioned your generation capacity. But even one week worth of energy consumption is impractical to store in today's batteries.

With over provisioning of production and storage, and accounting for 10 year storms, etc., nuclear is still cheaper (in countries with reasonable regulatory regimes).

Also, this is a war, and the nuclear plants have already been built. (and we only have a year or so left on the climate change clock anyway).

We do not have the capability to build enough batteries (chemical or otherwise) to power the grid entirely from renewables. Certainly not the capability to do it for less than the cost of nuclear power.

It is true that present battery production rates are too low, but the solution to that is simply to increase demand.

The lithium constraint will be solved by using sodium or iron batteries, depending on application.

Batteries are currently about 1000× too expensive, because

(a) you realistically need seasonal storage for when the wind/sun are both weak, so about 30 * 24 Wh/W, and

(b) you need around 2× the otherwise needed generation capacity to charge those batteries.

I keep hearing this battery argument but I have yet to see a single country backup its whole network with those.

You can't back up a whole country with batteries, or use it to flatten out the demand and supply peaks. Maybe with other storage, but I don't think it will work with batteries.

You would use batteries for example in a local small scale power plant, powering a small city district or a hospital or similar.

The baseload solution for renewables is nuclear.

Most of the "concerns" people have are the result of propaganda and lobbying by the American Petroleum Institute. Most of the original flower power anti-nuclear groups were funded by oil.

> Most of the original flower power anti-nuclear groups were funded by oil.

Where does that come from? I'm pretty sure I wasn't funded by anyone when I protested against the building of the Torness station on a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).

David Bower is the most notable example. He was the executive director of the Sierra Club in the late 60s early 70s and was a strong supporter of the clubs "Atoms Not Dams" initiative to protect natural waterways.

Suddenly he became staunchly anti-nuclear and tried to create enough chaos to destroy the club. After failing to do so, he left to start a competing organization called Friends of the Earth that was anti-nuclear first environmentalism second. They went on to fund and facilitate protests and anti-nuclear action around the world.

It was later discovered he received half a million dollars (about $7m today) from the CEO of ARCO around the time all the trouble started.

We won't have enough battery manufacturing capacity to produce a useful amount of base load storage for many years.

Ah yes, batteries made from non-renewable resources mined by literal child slaves is the solution to renewables' glaring baseload problems.

The only problem is, that makes them non-renewable.

Renewables + gas = not renewable.

Renewables + batteries = not renewable (plus there's the whole child slavery thing that ideologues ignore)

You're referring to cobalt, presumably, but lithium-ion is being replaced - now - by lithium-phosphate in cars, and base loads will probably use sodium or iron batteries, and none of these use cobalt.

The solution to the baseload problem is flexible demand. If it is cloudy and non windy, don't smelter aluminum, to put it bluntly. It is pretty easy, but we have to adjust our expectation of having 100% power at all times, and of the private sector being able to exploit it to 100%.

Solar, wind, water, geothermal, biogas and battery storage together are more then enough to "keep the lights on" at all times. And in peaks we can already produce more renewable energy than we can use. It is "just" a matter of investing into storage and flexible consumption.

What about prolonged weather crises that may affect supply for weeks on end? And how would that affect working hours in factories? How much of a GDP hit are we going to take by using "flexible consumption"?

There is no way to run a modern economy with intermittent energy supply.

...other than pumped storage, demand shaping and more grid interconnects.

Demand shaping doesn't really solve the energy availability problem; it's "giving up, with computers."

Wind and solar solve the availability problem - at a fraction of the cost of nuclear power.

Let’s do both! All the things you listed are exciting advancements but lacking the track record of nuclear.

Pumped storage isn't a generic solution. You need two huge volume reservoirs with as much vertical separation as possible. That's just not feasible in most places of the world.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/