Renewables and batteries are great for peaks though. And not very good for base load

Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks

Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation

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myrmidon 3 days ago | parent [-]

"Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied.

Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).

Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).

	▲	bluefirebrand 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time) The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price. I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time? Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.