Manufactured energy crisis gets crazy.
German official limits shower to 2 minutes in unheated home.
http://youtu.be/EPWhC4NOLnw

David Osmond did is a renewable engineer that heard people whinging about intermittency too much. This is what he found. Note "Other" is natural gas where the existing pumped hydro can't cope.

"Wind tends to generate above average during the night and during winter, complementing the solar generation. I have a bias to wind as it requires less short-term storage, which is used primarily to shift solar generation from the day to the evening and night...

..."Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’"

"Most weeks from late April through to the present required some levels of ‘Other’, due to the inability of wind, solar, storage and hydro to entirely meet demand throughout the week. The week starting on June 29 proved to be the most difficult week of the simulation, with ‘Other’ having to provide 8.1% of demand that week."

(The present in this model was August - so April to August all needed some gas.)

OK? That's it! Conclusive proof - from a renewables effort - that it CAN'T BE DONE! It NEEDS natural gas.

Except he isn't finished.

"If we built enough wind and solar to meet approximately 170% of demand over the year (ie, 70% over-generation), then supply and demand could have been matched on every day of the year with the help of existing hydro. It could eliminate all instances of ‘Other’ or long-term storage requirements. For comparison, this study had 18% of over-generation. Ideally a use would be found for all this over-generation, such as producing hydrogen or charging EVs, so long as they are able to reduce to near zero on the most difficult days of the year."

http://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/

So today's power needs CANNOT be met by 100% renewables - and increasingly the experts are agreeing. But an ALL renewable grid is possible if we overbuild.

Hey max Green,
I remember a year or so back WA was talking about purging a heap of excess solar power and I thought what a waste, all that excess power could be used to run bitcoin miners.

In any case I think they need some type of use case to make use of excess power in these situations.
Don't purge, find a use case for that power, run pumps and refill the dams from a lower holding pond if you have to.

Yes! Any work that can be done seasonally.

Imagine an industry that can run pretty much 11 months of the year and then pause for a few weeks – take some holidays.

You could desalinate water and store it. You could use Plasma Burners to recycle all our landfill. Indeed – the main reason we are NOT using them now is the cost of power! You could make extra hydrogen to store for industry or airlines. There’s just so much that could be done with 3 or 4 times your national grid’s ORDINARY electricity demand.

As long as they can pause for a few weeks in winter or whenever there’s a strong “Dark Lull” – imagine what could get done? This started off as an exercise in adapting to the intermittent, variable nature of Renewable Energy. But now just might help solve many other problems as well.

Evidence of stupidity is abundant on this thread, but not on the government's part.

Just look at the title! Base Load? Seriously?
Bazz, I'm having trouble believing you're sufficiently stupid to think the objective is (or should be) to turn renewable output into something that stays constant regardless of demand. So why the strawman? What do you imagine you gain by fudging the figures to make renewables look bad?

The real objective is to reduce reliance on expensive gas, and importantly to reduce the amount of time the gas fired generators are setting the electricity price.

Of course in the longer term we need to get to 100% renewables, and this requires an overbuild. But it is deceptive to consider the costs of an overbuild without also considering the benefits. The surplus will be used to generate hydrogen, for which there's a large and growing industrial demand. And some of the hydrogen will be turned back to electricity on those rare occasions when pumped hydro and battery storage are insufficient.

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Josephus,
Batteries are recyclable. There's a lot more copper out there than you realise. And solar cells and wind turbines are likely to last much longer than 20 years.

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Armchair,
One German limiting the time of his own showers is insignificant, no matter how much spin the Russians try to put on it.

Hey Aiden,
It's not just about 2min showers

http://www.efginternational.com/insights/2022/are-eu-natural-gas-prices-sensible.html

"On August 26, the European natural gas price hit a new intraday record of EUR 340 MW/h, before falling at the time of writing this note to EUR 230 MW/h.1 The price has increased by about 200% since mid-June and is about six times higher than its 2021 average. Furthermore, the European price of natural gas is almost eight times more expensive than the US Henry Hub benchmark."

It's about jobs, and industry which will never return, because it's no longer competitive.
And the US under the Inflation Reduction Act is taking all European industry.
The 2min showers will just help to push a fracture of EU unity.
- Wait a few months till the gas starts running out.

The war in Ukraine isn't just military.
It's also economic against all those who supported Ukraine.
Even China has criticised Germany after Merkels admission that they never really intended to implement the Minsk agreements, which were supported by all the West and ratified by the US at the UN and which became international recognised agreement.

As for militarily, I said recently that the next few months will be very bad for the Ukraine.

Russian Assault Units Have Entered BAKHMUT!
http://youtu.be/vqm2XVKdaio

Putin rejects Zelensky's plea for withdrawal; 'We aren't leaving, accept new realities' | Ukraine War
http://youtu.be/KYHhwpBXYdE

Russia Storming Bakhmut, Marinka Encircled. FT, Ukraine Short of AD Missiles, China Slams Merkel
http://youtu.be/sc-KoIH1cH8

And FYI the earlier video wasn't 'Russian spin'
- The bloke is Romanian born during the Soviet era who moved to the US when he was still young.