Originally posted by Inductor
The main objection I have to those sorts of pieces of masterly reporting is that it hides from the truth of transmission of power, and the realities of supplying a complex grid. It's a popular theme (amongst both journos and academics) to bash baseload power as a myth … but it is far from correct.
Every major grid failure across the world (such as the US East Coast shut down in the '70s, or in India last year) has been due to a failure to provide a system with the capacity to produce both active and reactive power in sufficient quantities - in the right locations.
Baseload systems with turbines (such as coal or nuclear) provide a huge reservoir of reactive power, whereas lightweight systems such as gas recipricators or wind turbines struggle. Solar panels produce basically none. If you do not have this capacity, your network will inevitably collapse.
It takes a huge amount of reactive power to simply energise a large transmission line (such as one of the feeders between the eastern states), and every electric motor or capacitor requires some level of reactive power to operate.
A requirement of connection to the grid by any generator is to be able to reinforce the grid in times where it runs outside of its specified limits. Generators must be able to kick in to improve voltage, frequency and reactive power where required. The process of doing this for a diesel generator or a large turbine is quite straight forward; small generators generally fall away quickly, but can handle brief problems, and pv drops output at an incredible rate as it is faced with adversity.
Power factor is the common term for defining the ratio of real to reactive power - and most suppliers penalize a customer for dropping below 0.9pf - as it starts to put extra pressure on the transmission network. When a pv inverter is faced with a pf of 0.8, it basically stops producing active power altogether, and therefore causes another problem when the contribution in active power it
was making disappears.
We need either baseload turbines to provide the integrity the network needs to operate. Without them you would need many multiples of battery backup to do the same job. Suddenly your 2GW capacity grid requires 6GW of battery capacity to run it …
At the risk of getting out of my depth, I will put this out there.
A reduction in baseload power, will be offset by an increase in embedded power generation and storage, (both residential and industrial).
Have we already reached peak base load?
) can be a real problem with too much embedded power - especially when it is all PV with no reactive capacity.
(20min delay)
