baseload

As for the bookkeeping: A certain amount of electricity is produced using renewables which is always < the current baseload.

The more advanced and productive the society, the higher the need for baseload power.

I'd be curious how truck-sized reactors work and whether or not you could operate them as load-followers rather than baseload.

Cities without baseload power have long periods of blackouts and intermittent power.

Ignoring developments in storage as part of the build out for renewable power will always make it seem as though you need loads of baseload.

Adding nuclear baseload would make things a lot easier.

But this writing forgets one thing - who is saying that PV (or wind for that matter) can replace established baseload power generators in a 1:1 swap?

You can do that with variable sources like wind and solar with a dispatchable source like hydro or gas, just as in the baseload + peak situation.

The need for baseload generation is not going anywhere.

Because it's not 10c/kWh overnight, baseload.

> The need for baseload generation is not going anywhere.

Typically, the grid operator runs nuclear plants at nearly 100% 24/7 (so called "baseload") due to this.

Except that nuclear plants do not serve peak demand in any way, unless by "peak" you mean something other than the electrical supply industry means by that term; nukes are by nature very much baseload generation, taking days and weeks to spin up and synchronise.

As we currently experience to great cost here in South Africa currently, where, due to a decade of neglected maintenance and capacity building brought about by a short-sighted government, rolling blackouts (euphemistically called "load shedding") are the norm, and diesel generation is brought to bear as a poor substitute for baseload capacity, at - as you may imagine - ruinous financial cost.

Baseload is a principle you can take advantage of to introduce massive plants that need to output at 100% almost all the time, like nuclear plants.