Baseload and Inflexibility
Abstract
Much of the remaining advocacy in favour of current generation technology revolves around the ability of the current coal, gas and nuclear technologies to provide baseload power, which is portrayed to be essential. The opinion that baseload is an essential feature of power generation is even influencing the design of concentrating solar thermal (CST) technology, with the advent of the ‘baseload’ Torresal solar tower plant in Spain (Torresal, 2011). The baseload + peaking generation strategy has been used for many decades, but is it the best way for the future? In this paper we show that baseload is not a necessity. It is, rather, a characteristic of low cost fossil, geothermal, and nuclear plants that are operated continuously to lower their relative capital expenditure. Running continuously, they are inflexible and unresponsive to load; it is said they are not ’dispatchable’ . Other, more expensive, peaking technologies must carry out load matching and bear the heavy cost of such intermittent operation. Are there non-baseload strategies that may be more suitable for renewable energy dominance of generation? We use the wind + solar strategy discussed in a companion paper at this conference (Mills and Cheng, 2011) as a example to illustrate that baseload generation is not essential to either renewable or fossil fuel generation, and that a broader and more insightful categorisation is now needed. We discuss other strategies that may arise as technology progresses.