"Baseload" clearly exists. There is a minimum load on the grid that it never falls below, which can be satisfied by constant-output generation methods that aren't as well suited to varying output, but also don't vary output and so can't don't create a shortfall when low output periods in variable sources last for longer than the usual amount of time or coincide with high demand.
> The sum of a bunch of intermittent sources is sufficient.
That only works if the intermittent sources are independent. In winter, solar output is going to be lower during the day than in summer, zero at night, you will have more hours of night, and heating load is both higher in winter and higher at night. There aren't going to be panels on one solar farm where this is the case and others that produce more, it will be true for the entire hemisphere for the entire season.
You're then left relying on wind if you don't want to use nuclear, but wind costs more than solar, and now you're lacking independence again. Weather is regional. There will be days when it's still and cold across a thousand square miles. Even batteries that could hypothetically take the load for a night are not going to have anything left by the end of a week of that, so you either need baseload generation methods or some currently unproven/uneconomical ultra high capacity long-term storage system or the week when that happens the power will go out and people will freeze.
As far as I can tell, anti-nuclear people either have a very shallow understanding of energy and can’t really have a conversation with you using well sourced numbers or they can but know the numbers show that nuclear is the only realistic choice and either way they just respond without numbers in very short and easy to repeat (and incorrect) arguments like “storage” and “bigger grids”.
Anti-nuclear environmentalists’ first choice would be to let people freeze to death. That being politically untenable their second choice is to continue using fossil fuels as the baseload and offset it as much as possible with renewables. They think nuclear is “an excuse” to continue the “business as usual” of affordable energy. They want energy to be unavailable and expensive. They oppose human progress and economic development as itself evil, even if the environmental impact is zero. Making energy expensive is their goal, not something they reluctantly accept. All the counter productive positions and bad arguments make perfect sense when you realize that they simply have a totally different goal from you.
> we found that the total annualised cost (including capital, operation, maintenance and fuel where relevant) of the least-cost renewable energy system is $7-10 billion per year higher than that of the “efficient” fossil scenario. For comparison, the subsidies to the production and use of all fossil fuels in Australia are at least $10 billion per year. So, if governments shifted the fossil subsidies to renewable electricity, we could easily pay for the latter’s additional costs.
They are claiming that a 100% renewable system would be CHEAPER than a fossil fuel system. If that doesn’t stink like some grade A bullshit to you I have nothing more to add.
That's an Australian academic in 2013 making that claim, and fair play to him, the official Australian cost estimates in 2024 say:
> ‘Firming costs’ is a term often used to describe the investments needed to make variable renewables a reliable source of electricity for our power system. In the GenCost report our preferred term is ‘integration costs’.
> Integration costs include investments in storage, peaking generation, transmission and system security devices such as synchronous condensers. Modelling determines the most cost-effective combination of these investments.
> ... renewables were still found to have the lowest cost range of any new build technology.
> For more detail go to the GenCost 2023-24 report section 5.2.1 Framework for calculating variable renewable integration costs on page 65.
Lol because you’re citing it. A study is not a magic spell you cast to immediately win arguments. Every study makes assumptions and you have to be prepared to discuss and defend them if you cite one. Another basic question, how much energy storage does their model require, because its probably way less that would actually be required. For comparison, this study of Germany found 56 TWh of storage to be optimal assuming a hypothetical and very cheap hydrogen storage system.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8#...
Or you burn a small amount of gas when these rare occurrences happen to coincide.
I suggest we call the periods that solar/wind/hydro/batteries can cover "baseload", as apparantly if you do so, you can pretend that the other energy being generated at non-baseload times does not matter, and simply declare victory with a job half done.
> Or you burn a small amount of gas when these rare occurrences happen to coincide.
But this presents a different problem: Instead of having to maintain several hundred GW of natural gas plants that you use on a daily basis, you now have to amortize the same cost even though they're only being used five days a year. At which point the incremental cost of building the same capacity in nuclear, which generates power 100% of the time and allows you to avoid not only the natural gas plants but that amount of solar and storage, is looking pretty good.
