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160 points riordan | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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bryanlarsen ◴[] No.45955571[source]
Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation".

Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants.

In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable.

To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants.

That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants.

If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.

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inglor_cz ◴[] No.45959254[source]
Suitable locations for pumped hydro are very limited, it is a comparably rare resource.

A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat.

Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.)

For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.

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1. bryanlarsen ◴[] No.45960035[source]
Pumped hydro just requires a lake at the bottom of a slope. Unlike hydro generation, it doesn't require flow. Here's almost a million locations suitable for pumped hydro: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
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2. defrost ◴[] No.45960054[source]
Two farm dams at a minimum, one at either end of a slope.

You can serve a small town of 500 or so people (plus tourists) with a mini systems for ~ $8 million (AU)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157

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3. bryanlarsen ◴[] No.45966110[source]
And that location probably wasn't on the ANU map, meaning there were are far more than 1 million suitable locations.