Comment Re:Energy is always political. Not greens, origina (Score 1) 287
Base load isn't really a thing IMHO (nor the optimion of the previous CEO of UK's National Grid)... It was in effect invented (as domestic demand) to use some of the electricity from plants that could not easily ramp down when industrial demand fell daily, eg at night.
About the most obvious thing that typically "needs" to run overnight in a home is a fridge/freezer, but people leave all sorts of unnecessary crap on such as cable TV boxes (would be half the load of our fridge/freezer if we didn't turn it off at the wall because it's standby mode is only 1W less than "on").
After we get people to just turn stuff off, we can neuter the residual load with a small amount of thermal or electrical storage if we want to. For example, I have the smallest-possible Enphase battery (~1kWh) installed as an experiment, and because it is very nimble we present virtually no load to the grid at night for most of the year:
http://www.earth.org.uk/Enphas...
Note that I do choose to run some loads such as dishwasher some nights to do my bit to help flatten the grid demand curve and effectively supplement grid-attached storage, but that's elective, not base load.
Rgds
Damon