Baseload power plants are not necessary to maintain supply in an energy system dominated by wind and solar power, and only have a place in future systems if they help cut costs, say researchers in Germany.
In a new report, researchers from the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) show that energy systems dominated by wind and solar can deliver low-carbon, reliable electricity using several strategies that don’t include baseload plants. They use solar and wind power combined with energy storage, smarter or more flexible electricity use, and residual power plants—like hydrogen-powered gas turbine plants—that operate only when needed.
The researchers say operating a flexible hydrogen system, one that can help grids respond to changes in electricity consumption and production, is a key to their analysis.
The report challenges the prevailing idea that baseload power stations are essential for a continuous supply of electricity.
“The findings of our discussion paper should directly translate to any energy system worldwide,” said Philipp Stöcker, scientific officer at the Energy Systems of the Future (ESYS) initiative, which includes acatech. “Of course, local conditions apply, changing some nuances, but not the overall setting,” he told The Energy Mix.
Baseload power is the minimum amount of electricity needed to meet demand at any given time. Historically, that need has been met with continuously operating fossil fuel or nuclear power plants, which are supplemented by other energy sources to meet additional demand. Because these plants are costly to build, they must run almost non-stop to be financially viable, the researchers explain.
While baseload power plants have long been seen as essential to a steady electricity supply, the new research questions their role in a future dominated by solar and wind power. The researchers modelled four baseload technology scenarios—nuclear power plants, geothermal energy, gas power plants with carbon dioxide capture, and nuclear fusion power plants—and found that these technologies could only be included in future energy systems if they reduce costs, reports Clean Energy Wire.
The researchers say gas-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) are the most likely to be implemented at scale in the next 20 years, but add that their adoption would require significant infrastructure development for CCS, as well as the operation of both gas and hydrogen supply systems. Any remaining emissions from gas production and power plant operations would also have to be addressed, adding a cost to offset them. In such a scenario, baseload power plants are unlikely to reduce the cost of energy supply, the researchers say.
Baseload plants could be useful in a supplementary role—for example, to support hydrogen production and reduce the need for hydrogen imports—but only if they are cost-effective and meet safety and climate policy requirements. However, the researchers think it is unlikely baseload plants will continue to be cost-competitive, since they become more expensive per kilowatt-hour in a shift to renewables.
“For baseload power plants to lead to a substantial cost reduction, their costs would have to fall significantly below the level forecast today,” said Karen Pittel, deputy board chair at ESYS. “In fact, we estimate that the risks of cost increases and delays in baseload technologies tend to be even higher than with the further expansion of solar and wind energy.”
The report is expected to be published in English in February 2025 .
The study authors’ expectation of fossil gas fuelled CCGT with CO2 capture and geological storage being run to produce hydrogen with its lousy energy efficiency as an energy storage medium – is so fatuous as to discredit the judgement of those writing the report. While trying to slate the idea of “base load” power, they appear to ignore the obvious and continuing need for dispatchable power – be that from a generator or from some form of energy storage.
Or have we reached the stage with Hydrogen, Solar & Wind energy where their competitive potentials are boosted innaccurately as a matter of commercial practice . . .
The game changer that will resolve Solar & Wind variability and remove the justification for their “Over-building” is the deployment of “Closed Loop Geothermal,” which can be sited almost anywhere by drilling loop-wells deep enough to reach standard high temperature rock, and can be set in clusters where high outputs of dispatchable power and heat are required. By avoiding fracking the risk of seismic damages is removed, with fresh water being circulated by means of a thermosyphon instead of geological brines.
Beside the power output levelling the supply troughs in variable renewables’ outputs, the heat output can serve District Heating Systems as the economic alternative to undue dependence on heat pumps. The first commercial plant is being developed in Germany by a firm called Eavor, who are on record as predicting very competitive costs of $50/MWh by 2030.
Thanks, Lewis. We’ve been picking up commentary for a while that clean heat is the under-appreciated, unsung benefit of geothermal. It’s a story we’ll be watching for in the new year…though I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the reference to “undue” reliance on heat pumps.
Mitchell, thanks for your response.
Here in Europe the heat pump issue is becoming a fiasco, with govts being steered into blanket reliance on its wholesale adoption, despite the need to double the transmission grid capacity and the large fractions of the populations either lacking the wealth to afford the installed costs, or lacking suitable housing, or both. This makes govts (such as Germany’s coalition) look both callous and out of touch, and is a gift to the bots and trolls of Russia and other petrostates as they try to subvert elections in favour of pro-russian candidates.
Given that the transition is a multi-trillion dollar / existential issue for the petrostates, it follows that they will exploit every avenue that could disrupt efforts for its advancement, including covert support of lobbying for the most expensive and longest lead-time “low carbon” technologies, as a means of starving renewables of funds and maintaining fossil fuel usage for as long an interim as possible.
The Australian rightists’ plan to begin developing a national nuclear power industry is a brazen case in point, as it excludes renewables’ rational mass-deployment while spending 20 or 30 years on getting even a significant fraction of power supply from new nuclear stations. Meanwhile fossil interests would rule.
Looking across the range of such diversionary technologies, nuclear may be the oldest but others are just as effective, inclding heat-pumps, hydrogen-production for energy storage, and the misnamed CCS (Carbon Dioxide Capture, Compression & Geological Storage: CDCCGS) whose false promise is even used to paint fossil projects as “CCS-ready,” and to try to justify attrocities like govt-subsidised “Old-Forest-Biomass-Fired-Power.”
Some would claim that the widespread boosting of such dubious wildly expensive options is down to worldwide stupidity and happenstance, but that would be to claim that the propagandists of extremely powerful petrostate rulers are simply not doing their job properly. And as the man said, “I am not paranoid; I am experienced.”
Love that closing quote, Lewis, thanks! (The rest of your analysis, too.)