• maevyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 days ago

    Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:

    • Hospitals and emergency services
    • Data centers and communications
    • 24 hour transit needs
    • 24 hour lighting in cities
    • Ventilation, heating/cooling for certain climates

    Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.

    If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.