The compelling complaint about baseload power is that while it did save money in the past, it doesn’t any more. Sun and wind are cheaper than this “cheap” power source, AND backup battery power is cheaper than the backup plants needed for baseload power.
Originally published at Green Energy Times. An Old Paradigm The electricity most of us use comes from a system that was designed mostly over a hundred years ago. It was built around concepts that benefited customers of that time. It started with baseload power plants with transmission lines carrying the … [continued]
Because of the nature of baseload power plants, only supplying enough to cover the base load, other plants have to be put online to cover any demand above the base load. These include load-following plants, which are more costly to run. In the old days, many of these ran on oil. Nowadays, the fuel of choice is natural gas, though the design of the plant is a different from that of a gas-fired baseload plant.
A number of stories have popped up in the news recently about turning traditional hydroelectric stations, which generate power by using water captured from a flowing river, into pumped storage facilities, which cycle the water using more energy to do so than they produce.
Renewable energy generation is still on the rise in Germany, though at a much lower pace than in the years around 2010, writes Marius Buchmann of Jacobs University in a detailed overview of the German electricity market in 2017. Costs of the feed-in tariff are stagnating, notes Buchmann, but redispatch costs which grid operators incur to keep the system stable, reached a new record far above €1 billion.
A new $72 million round of funding for high temperature concentrating solar power R&D means the US nuclear energy sector will face stiff competition for zero emission, baseload electricity generation.
With batteries like the Hornsdale Power Reserve, power from solar and wind power will be more valuable, because with battery backup their power can be used to supply an increasing share of baseload power. And that increase in value, which might not necessarily be reflected by an increase in price, makes their power all the more attractive.
In a blatant money-grab for the coal industry, Rick Perry’s Energy Department is pushing for direct subsidies to dirty, un-economical coal-fired power plants.
Don Harwin, the energy minister of the NSW Coalition government, has made a dramatic departure from the bulk of his state and federal colleagues by declaring that it was time to move on from the notion of “baseload” power as essential to the reliability of the future grid.
A study by Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford and 9 others, 100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States (Roadmap), has been very much in the news over the past few weeks. It was published just over two years ago, but a controversial article in response appeared only in the past few weeks. It is clear to me that much reported in the wider media on these two articles has been wrong.
