Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes I'm not an electrical engineer, but it seems to me that the concept of base load is useful because, at least for now, we don't have enough yearly renewal production to cover the consumption needs. But we also need better ways of using excess production. Two of them are storage and hydrogen production. It would probably make businesses sense for renewable power plants to invest in plugging storage or hydrogen production solutions to their operations.
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This means that the concept of "base load" is not really relevant, because there is no consistent base. And when the residual load goes negative, the wholesale price of electricity goes negative as well.
Last year the Netherlands had negative wholesale electricity prices for about 7% of the year, and that amount is only going to grow.
You can't afford to run a nuclear reactor when electricity prices are negative, but you also can't shut it down every day either.
>You can't afford to run a nuclear reactor when electricity prices are negative, but you also can't shut it down every day either.
What the lobbying for NPP in countries like the Netherlands is doing is securing legislation where "you" as in the company operating the nuclear reactor actually CAN afford that.
A big component of that is making the concept of "base load generators" a special category with financial compensation. So even at negative prices costs are compensated.
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@mattsqu @patterfloof @notjustbikes This is a "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" objection. We're in a transition, and the best ways to finish it might not be obvious until there's more experience with the whole tech stack. But it's doable: engineers are doing it.
@mattsqu @patterfloof @notjustbikes As a "surprise, that's obvious" example, California recently had so much "4h storage" that they discharged it in tranches overnight, time-shifting cheap solar so the sun really does shine all day. Storage is a cheat code.
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@wall0159
However, the assumption that nuclear power is dispatchable is a myth: once you payed all the sunk cost to build a nuclear plant, it has to run 24/7 for a very long life if it ever wants to have remotely competitive prices per output.
@notjustbikes -
Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
@notjustbikes I would start thinking that this might be some form of psyop/propaganda.
Coz those commenters mostly agree, but (there's something). It a playbook to delay any action and/or confuse people. -
@notjustbikes I'm not an electrical engineer, but it seems to me that the concept of base load is useful because, at least for now, we don't have enough yearly renewal production to cover the consumption needs. But we also need better ways of using excess production. Two of them are storage and hydrogen production. It would probably make businesses sense for renewable power plants to invest in plugging storage or hydrogen production solutions to their operations.
@notjustbikes Nuclear would be great if there weren't those small issues you mentioned. That is valid for new nuclear power plants. What I don't think makes sense are decisions like Germany's of unplugging the nuclear power plants they already had working. If there was a commercially viable solution for the small modular power reactors, that would be a good solution.
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@notjustbikes I'm not an electrical engineer, but it seems to me that the concept of base load is useful because, at least for now, we don't have enough yearly renewal production to cover the consumption needs. But we also need better ways of using excess production. Two of them are storage and hydrogen production. It would probably make businesses sense for renewable power plants to invest in plugging storage or hydrogen production solutions to their operations.
@notjustbikes in terms of storage, though, the current battery solutions don't look like a viable solution as they are expensive and their production and recycling environmental track records aren't great.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes
Its not so much renewables, they already lost that battle -- its the coming battery boom that threatens to stabilize the cost of electric production below where fossils can compete. -
@notjustbikes Solar on suburban homes is a funny thing. At the latitude of Amsterdam, it can lead to demand evaporation for 7-8 months of the year if the home has a sufficiently sized battery.
The solar from a typical suburban home can carry 10-15 kWp of solar, leading to 7-11 MWh production per year in east/west configuration and 13-16 MWh production in a south facing ideal deployment.
There is a 1:10 production difference between January and June, though, so the household likely needs to buy power Nov-Feb, but will likely break even or almost break even in Mar, and not consume any power from the grid in April to September, and begin to load from the grid lightly on October.
Heating with a heat pump will have them but 3-4 MWh during winter.
(Numbers based on our 75 kWh/(year and qm) home, and our demand, but they seem to be applicable on a more general scale, too).
For power producers this means they have to supply power to homes like ours only for winter.
Fortunately wind + battery can actually do that without CO2.
@isotopp @notjustbikes but batteries are terribly expensive. I have 5 solar panels and I've completely recovered that investment in less than two years because they were subsidised.They would cover half my daily needs if I could use all the production. So I've considered buying batteries, but there's no way I can recover that investment in a reasonable timeframe. At least not with the current electricity cost, which is very low.
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@CIMB4 @notjustbikes
This reasoning (waiting for nuclear keeps us using fossil fuels) is nicely explained in the Australian context in this video by @thejuicemedia https://youtu.be/JBqVVBUdW84I'm in Australia, living in a house with PV panels and a battery. I sell electricity to the grid in the mornings and evenings and buy during the day, if needed. Here are the prices per kWh sellers may get tomorrow morning, the percentage at the bottom is the share of renewables in the grid:
...any more inflexible supply from the coal power plants (or nuclear if we had it) and they would go negative.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes I know this isn't very helpful, but I was first exposed to the idea that Ontario nuclear capacity is important because of "base load" watching #TVO's The Agenda about 15 years ago. I don't recall the details though.
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This was always my understanding of how renewables make the concept of "base load" irrelevant, again, as a person with a literal degree in Electrical Engineering.
But I was gaslit by so many people that I felt the need to research the current situation again today.
This could just be people using out of date information, but I suspect this is anti-renewables propaganda. Otherwise I don't know why so many people would even know what a "base load" is.
@notjustbikes A repeated expression of this kind is always suspicious of one/repeated source, and of people who don't know what they are saying. I definitely didn't know what base load was
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Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com "Base load" is a myth invented to justify nuclears inflexibility.
RE: https://plasmatrap.com/notes/af2j96lbyl -
When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes Yes, definitely fossil fuel propaganda.
I hear any amount of anti-solar, anti-wind, pro-nuclear, pro-fossil propaganda all the time from right wing politicians, but anyone who paying attention sees that renewables actually do work. That's why our total energy bill last year was €120 (including taxes, connection fees etc.) because solar panels, heat pump, insulation...
Meanwhile, the nuclear power station that I protested against in the 1980s (Hinkley C in Somerset, UK) still isn't running. It was cancelled at least once (not due to protests, but because then PM Margaret Thatcher could see it was obviously not economical), then deacds ago the proposal came out of retirement and they started building again.
Let's talk about intermittency: my solar panel installation began decades after Hinkley C and they've operated for a decade and a half, but Hinkley Point C has yet to produce a single kWh of electricity.
Let's talk about cost: The bill merely for construction of Hinkley C has risen to a whopping €18000 per kW output, which is a far cry from the ~€500 per kW that you pay retail for a solar installation. And that doesn't even include the uranium that they need to import from Russia to run the thing - while the sun costs nothing.
At this point, nuclear just looks absurd.
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