29 December

Discussing ‘baseload’ power yesterday. One of the most misleading and misunderstood concepts. Baseload power is NOT about supply of power, it’s about demand for power. It is NOT the baseline amount of power we need to keep the lights on. It’s the amount of power we all need to *use* (the ‘load’ on the grid), to prevent us having to shut down huge coal-fired and nuclear-powered power stations every night. It’s extremely expensive to turn a coal or nuclear plant on and off, and they can’t operate like that anyway, it breaks them. So they have to run 24 hours every day. The ‘base-load’ is how much we all have to USE, to prevent them needing to be switched on and off. ‘Operational demand’, in the graph below. You can also see that the minimum operational demand (base-load) of about 5000 MW, below which the coal stations have to be turned off, is already about to be breached in Australia by the availability of a tidal wave of solar, the yellow. Right now the regulator deals with this by turning peoples’ solar off by force, to protect the coal plants. Curtailment. A ridiculous situation, where massive amounts of free power is turned off, to protect massively expensive broken coal power. That’s why the regulator and companies are falling over themselves to build storage, like batteries. Then they’ll turn the coal plants off, forever.