"Renewable no good if they can't replace base load. You do like being warm at winter & turning the Air co on in summer & cooking your dinner after dark???? If you like power rationing & only want power on during the day then knock your self out."
Baseload power is the minimum level of demand on the grid over a period of time. When the Australian grid expanded from the 1950s to the 1970s, the leading option was coal, as it offered cheap, reliable power. There were no concerns about emissions or global warming back then. Coal-fired power stations are designed not to be switched off. They can take days to fire up from cold to full capacity, and it’s very uneconomical to shut them off at times of low demand. Australia’s coal plants were therefore sized so they could run continuously, scaled back to a minimum output overnight and scaled up during the day as demand rose. If the coal plants reached full capacity, additional generation was brought in, as needed, from sources such as gas and hydro. However, there generally wasn’t enough demand overnight to keep the coal plants ticking over, so regulators and operators offered very low-cost electricity for consumers to run their hot water systems in the middle of the night and use the excess generator power that was available, thereby sustaining the “baseload” on the power stations.
So baseload was also the minimum amount of power the coal plants could supply to the grid without having to be turned off.
