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This could just be people using out of date information, but I suspect this is anti-renewables propaganda.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

@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.