The crisis in Europe and elsewhere shoots holes in the theory that baseload is somehow no longer applicable. Baseload is not cheap particularly because it must be very reliable (and is more expensive), and is why green energy alone is too variable and completely insufficient at present to replace other baseload providers.
The assumption embedded in that line of thought is that the failure modes (and times) of peak and baseline power will never significantly overlap. Essentially, by injecting more variance and different types of uncertainty, frailty and the chance of systemic failure are increased (as shown in Europe), especially regarding second and third order effects.
Clearly, placing any country's energy security in the hands of ever changing climate (less winds and high cloud cover) or at the feet of dictators has to factor in some where.
There are a number of issues:
1) Short term, the faster we avoid CO2 the better. If SLAs make that more complex, then it is a net loss. Long term, the situation will be different because cheap gains will be gone.
2) Europe has mostly privatized energy. Who is suppose to set the SLA?
3) Nuclear plants need to be refueled. Does the SLA include a couple of months downtime every few years? That would suggest that the SLA is uniquely tailored to nuclear. 100% uptime? How is nuclear going to deal with that?
4) Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear.
Basically what we need is flexible electricity production. On their own, nuclear, solar and wind are all equally bad at flexible electricity production. So the questions are:
- how do we get cheap storage
- how do we minimize the amount of storage we need
> Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear.
Load following nuclear power stations are a thing.
--- start quote ---
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute
Technically that is true. Economically, that means that if a nuclear power plant runs for significant amount of time at 50%, the price of electricity will almost double.
Base power is only a useful term if it's cheaper than peak power, since you can fill 100% of your power needs solely with peak power.