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

"Farmland needs to look like farms."

I used to live on a farm and I have no objections to farms per se, far from it.

But nothing much about a farm, even a small one, is "natural". Nothing about the hills that we've stripped of natural cover to put sheep on, or woods that we've turned into flat monoculture fields is "natural". No more natural in any case than a wind or a solar farm.

And if every household reduced consumption by a factor or 2 or 3 as I have (while adding children to mine) we could get by with a lot less of all sorts of farms while leading pleasant lives.

Rgds

Damon

No turbines work well in the messy air of urban evironments, still less so small VAWTs, much as I wish it weren't so.

Come over to fieldlines.com and read the discussions there on this very topic.

Rgds

Damon

Yes, look at the UK's retail electricity and gas markets for example. I can choose my supplier at will.

Rgds

Damon

Happens in the UK at retail level for electricity, gas, and POTS (phones), and works reasonably well.

Water is on the way too.

Rgds

Damon

Why the pointless homophobic slur?

The "world is going to hell, everything's getting worse" trope is beloved of mass newspapers and always has been, and sells, but is almost always wrong.

I've been seeing more (safely) opened doors and minds and stores of data and of late, indeed people going out of their way to be nice to one another in hot conditions, and so on, so please don't assume that the worst is true.

Life generally gets better in all sorts of ways, even if lots of it could be better!

Rgds

Damon

In the UK only one of our nukes (Sizewell B) is capable of load following AFAIK, but it never has.

In the French fleet the limit the things can be turned down without unpleasant effects ("Xenon poisoning" IIRC) is about 50% for a new load of fuel, 0% when near expired, thus ~25% overall. Which limits nukes to serving ~75% of peak load since they would not be able to dial back far enough at minimum load.

Other designs may be different, but less good for civilian use, for example.

Rgds

Damon

If you can't crank things down on demand then you can't crank them up either (and/or have to throw away lots of energy).

In that respect nukes and solar/wind are similar: that is my point. You need something else in the mix to make a functioning grid with them.

Rgds

Damon

With nukes, you generally can't turn them down much (not at all in GB, and only an average of ~25% in France which is pretty sophisticated). And coal can be fairly slow load following.

GB's last major outage (500k users load shed) was caused by a nuke and then a coal plant tripping out. I'm not aware of any load shedding caused by renewables intermittency in the GB grid. Operators know about it and plan for it. Nukes are definitely useful but NOT a panacea.

Yes, storage makes and will make a huge difference, but enough of the conspiracy theories over smart meter cutoffs and drooling over nukes please.

Rgds

Damon

I may have misunderstood, but please show me any stats supporting your apparent claim that UK-based wind turbines are lasting only 5 years.

See here:

https://www.renewableuk.com/pa...

or from the appropriate UK authorities (BEIS and the Crown Estate),

or from one of the operators:

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/o...

Indeed I have visited some of these turbines more than 5 years ago and they are still there!

Some from another operator near one of the sites I visited have been upgraded; far from being abandoned.

So I don't understand your claim.

Rgds

Damon

Yep, industrial is very different.

Anyhow, thanks for the reminder on low-power lighting.

Damon

OK, I'll check up on that, thanks. 0.9 is quite decent given that as you say an uncorrected device can be ~0.3, which caused a friend of mine some head-scratching:

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o...

But still point (2) still stands: are domestic customers charged for anything other than real power?

Rgds

Damon

Schematics were available and I think that I still have mine!

Rgds

Damon

1) In the EU (to pass CE) I think that the pf has to be very close to 1 by law.

2) Again, I'd be amazed if any significant fraction of (EU) domestic users pay for anything other than real power, so pf is irrelevant to them.

But tell me why I'm wrong...

Rgds

Damon