They are not as flexible as stopping all production when there's a quiet night and wind+solar produce 0 electricity.

Hard to say absolutely, because some actually are, e.g. producing graphite as the rest heat can keep the process going for quite a while. And, more importantly, because we do not have 100% renewable grids yet.

Hydro does provide power without wind or sun so, as does bio gas, geothermal, pumped hydro.

Nowadays, base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago, industry quitely adapted without any body noticing, unless they wanted to know.

> because some actually are, e.g. producing graphite

How much graphite are we producing compared to, well, almost literally everything else?

> Hydro does provide power without wind or sun so, as does bio gas, geothermal, pumped hydro.

Hydro, geothermal and pumped hydro have the downsides of: you can't build them everywhere. "Bio gas" is a euphemism for, well, burning hydrocarbons (though burning gas is cleaner than burning coal)

> Nowadays, base load is nowhere near as important anymore so as it was decades ago,

This is a patently false statement. If anything, base load is much more important now than decades ago because almost everything we have and depend on requires electricity 24/7.

> industry quitely adapted without any body noticing, unless they wanted to know.

Well, if your only example of such industry is "graphite production", then it sure has. I sampled a few countries here: https://app.electricitymaps.com (note: the time is European, so you have the reversed numbers for "the other side of the world")

                     02:00     14:00
    Germany         43.7 GW   61.9 GW
    France          58.6 GW   59.2 GW
    UK              25.3 GW   31.4 GW
    Central Brazil  47.4 GW   48.2 GW
    
    US
    PMJ Interconn   94.2 GW   88.0 GW
    SW Power Pool   33.6 GW   34.6 GW
    California      21.9 GW   16.2 GW

Oh, look. You need significant baseload everywhere.

No power plant can be built anywhere you want, can it? Point being, and I never said we do not need baseload, baseload needs are much, much lower so than they used to be. Graphite production is just one of those really energy hungry industries that found a way to be flixible regarding demand, despite using, in my example, WW1 era production plants. Now imagine what can be done with modern production technology. Other industries I have first hand knowledge of: chemical plants and paper manufacturing. When you do production planning, when you consume electricity is an important constraint. And this flexibility is being rolled out to othet sites and industries, day after day, all the time.

So no, baseload needs are not as important as they used to be. Something people fail to accept, it seems... And those base load needs can be met, among other things, larger grids covering a bigger area. Also something tgat has been found as completely feasible in multiple studies. Feel free to ignore all of that so, I don't want to harm your strongly hold opinion.

You know what we had decades ago that required electricity 24/7? Steel mills, heavy industry, trains, 3-shift operated production sites and domestic appliances. You know what we have today requiring 24/7 electricity? The same list... Unless you think modern industry came into being with the internet...

Funny how it's both "the same things" and "we don't need the same baseload anymore".

Meanwhile electricity consumption has grown almost 5-fold since 1980 https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu... and ~7.5-fold since the 1950s: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Yes, electricity consomption increased. As did industrial output and GDP, across the world. Not sure where the surprise is in that.

And I never said we don't need baseload anymore, I said, and that is confirmed by grid operators, studies and first habd knowldge, that demand, and there only big consumers matter, is getting more and more flexible. Hence, baseload is less important today than it was before.

Know why industrial consumers do that? Money, they are paid for that flexibility: either by getting free electricity or getting paid (negative prices) at certain periods. Or by getting paid to not consume electricity in certain periods, same way peaker plants are paid to generate electrivity in these periods to maintain grid balance. The large cobsumers do this, as I said, since at least a decade (first time I was directly involved with it, so propably longer), and they do this on production equipment and processes almost a century old.

We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are predictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes (almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that).

Not sure what's so hard to understand about any of that...

> And I never said we don't need baseload anymore, I said, and that is confirmed by grid operators, studies

So far we only have your word for it

> and first habd knowldge

And this is your word. That's it.

The rest I really don't care about because I'm just as capable of writing plausible-sounding walls of text without a single link to a study or a statistic. I try not to do that.

> that demand, and there only big consumers matter

Ah yes. Only big consumers. We've increased our electricity requirements 5-fold, but that doesn't matter. The "big consumers" will halt their production when there isn't enough electricity.

> We do need baseload, because while solar and wind are unpredictable, they depend on the weather to produce, and might not produce enough sometimes

I'd say often

> almost a guarantee, your claim of zero is local so, large grids mitigate that

The grid can mitigate it if there's a stable baseload generation available. A month ago there was a day when all of Europe's wind and solar combined was producing something like 10% of installed capacity. Saved by copious amounts of coal burning (and also by nuclear and some hydro).

So, riddle me this: when there isn't enough renewable energy, do "big consumers" halt their production, or the electricity consumption remains the same? And what does this tell you about "we don't require as much baseload anymore", given that our electricity requirements have grown 500% in the past 40 years?

Let me riddle you this then:

If there isn't enough solar and wind (hydro and other green / renewable electricity sources are perfectly base load capable), yes, large consumers reduce their consumption for that period. So, in percentage and not absolute values (no surprise you don't get that difference, you don't get neither the electricity has to he consumed when produced and production / consumption lives on a time scale...), we need less base load generation then previously. Heck, even Germany, among other countries, had days with > 80% renewable electricity on the grid, so we know it is technically absolutely possible.

Coal is bad, agree. Nuclear is a great stop gap until everything is ready, grid, capacity, industry and the like, to function with a renewable epectricity grid. Building new NPPs is a dead end so: too expensive, takes too much time and gets nowhere near the additional capacity we need, since most new NPPs replace old ones the net nuclear capacity gain is negligible.

The grid can mitigate if somwhere on the grid sufficient electricity is produced, base load, nuclear, renewables or somethibg else doesn't matter. Throw in demand flexibility and you are almostv here already. Storage is lacking, but even that is built out, e.g. most new residential PV has some storage component.

And since you insist: Yes, big consumers absolutely do stop production if needed and financially interesting. Know what? They even schedule production accordingly in close alignmwnt with electricity markets and grid operators. Hard to believe, I know.

Edit: I know big consumers do stop or scale down production, because my wife does so in production planning every week. And I scheduled production runs the same way during my time in production planning in the chemical industry. Oh, and one of the green belt projects I coached looked for ways to optimize production runs to enable more and more short notice shut downs for limited periods. The last one happened over ten years ago.

> If there isn't enough solar and wind (hydro and other green / renewable electricity sources are perfectly base load capable), yes, large consumers reduce their consumption for that period

Proof beyond "I said so"?

> So, in percentage and not absolute values (no surprise you don't get that difference, you don't get neither the electricity has to he consumed when produced and production / consumption lives on a time scale...), we need less base load generation then previously

So, again, empty words with ad hominem attacks.

"Oh we still produce shitloads of electricity not because we need to, but because you're stupid enough to understand we don't need to produce it".

Strangely enough, instead of "not needing as much baseload" everyone is busy running coal plants to sustain that baseload they don't need or something.

> Edit: I know big consumers do stop or scale down production, because my wife does so

Ah yes, it must be true then. I'll ask my wife, she knows something, too.

---

Anyway. I'm not interested in this discussion any further. Because nothing trumps "you're too stupid to understand" and "my wife said so".

Adieu.

>> Adieu

Yeah, couldn't agree more. Hard to discuss with someone who refuses to take other view points into account if they don't fit the narrative, regardless how well founded those other view points are.