Energy consumption goes up and down throughout the day, but the "base load" is the minimum amount, even at the lowest point in the day. So nuclear power is good for providing this "base" because it's consistent and always running.

The issue is that renewables sometimes output so much electricity that, especially when it's sunny, the grid makes *way* too much electricity. The electricity consumption of the grid minus renewables is called the "residual load", and it very very often goes NEGATIVE.

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.

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This could just be people using out of date information, but I suspect this is anti-renewables propaganda.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.

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.