Talk:Load-following power plant

Gas turbines
Thanks for the article. This has helped me a great deal to understand the ways electricity providers manage supply conditions to meet load. However, the section on Gas turbine power plants doesn't seem to fit with the other explanations. I would think that gas turbine power plants would the ideal candidate for load following. In other words the peakers would be older and less efficient coal and oil power plants, with the same gas turbine plants always topping off the power supply to meet the load through their highly variable operability. Here's what I would think. The same gas turbine plants would round out the power supply whether the peakers were running or not, implying that the gas turbine would need to be capable of filling in the continuous capacity between base loads and peak loads and then provide the same added power again on top of the peakers when the peak plants are brought online. _______________________________________________________________________________ | load following: gas turbine during peak load hours or months                | | peaker plants: less efficient and perhaps smaller coal – oil turbine plants | | load following: gas turbine during off-peak load hours or months            | | base load plants: nuclear – coal – some hydroelectric –                     | |______________________________________________________________________________|

It seems that the hydroelectric plants can act as any of these three types too (base, peak or load following) depending on the type of hydroelectric and the behavior of the waterways it damns. It seems too that only gas, oil and hydroelectric will serve well as load following plants. Am I understanding this correctly? Indexheavy (talk) 03:02, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Shouldn't there be a section for diesel-gas engine solutions? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nyonglema (talk • contribs) 13:24, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Nuclear power plants
You may want to refer to http://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureload-following-capabilities-of-npps/. Load following by NPPs is done in several countries (which have a high nuclear share in electricity generation) --160.44.230.196 (talk) 08:01, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Categories of power plants
This is my understanding. Base load plants are those that have the least savings when de-rated; run at less than maximum power. I assume that this means those plants that have the lowest variable unit cost. You do not save much by running a nuclear plant at less than 100%. The fuel degrades at about the same rate. This is almost a situation of zero marginal cost: use it or lose it. So they run.

When the nuclear plants are in an outage, then some other generation facility may be forced to run at 100% of nameplate, and fulfills the "always on" condition, and those who work in those plants are happy to prove to the management that they can do it. But the marginal cost is the fuel cost, so that the cost of coal can be saved by running at less that maximum, if the demand falls. Steam turbines are run by steam, so that there is a limit to how quickly these plants can respond to changes in demand, and may not be able to keep up. These are, to my experience, classed as load-following, because they chase the load, but cannot be counted on to "catch it" in a timely manner.

There is always "spinning reserve" - units running synchronized to the grid cycles, not generating power, but ready to step in as needed.

Gas turbine power plants are generally used for peaking, because the time it takes to go from a stopped state to synchronized with the grid is short, measured in minutes.

Solar and wind are different. Since there is no fuel cost, they are in use-it-or-lose-it state, which seems like it would be good for base load. Base load has been considered to be "aways on", and this is not true for solar or wind. It is true that even nuclear is not "always on", since nuclear plants can be down for an emergency, or for a scheduled re-fueling.

Hydro power is that magical source: base load, no fuel cost. And pumped storage is like a large battery that can be charged and discharged as needed.

Fuel oil is used only for emergency generators in the USA. There are no large plants that use oil as a fuel in the USA, that I know of. Many plants have diesel generators for "black start" capability - namely to start up the equipment at the plant, and the soft drink machines, when recovering from a black-out situation. ( Martin | talk • contribs 03:59, 26 March 2015 (UTC))

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First paragraph is misleading
The first paragraph on base power plants is very misleading. The list of technologies which contribute to base power reads as if all coal, nuclear, gas etc. are strictly base power technologies. This is all walked back in the later sections, but it is a really bad way to start an otherwise decent article. Please edit this paragraph to exclude the technologies and concentrate on the attributes that distinguish base power from load following power.

Personally, I would begin with a discussion of time scales in load response, and then associate base power, load following power, peaker power, spinning reserves, etc. with these time scales. Include time scales right down to millisecond scales in this part to get the point across that there is a lot of detail to the overall balancing act. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:BDFB:36A0:B583:6407:3BD1:4B0 (talk) 18:58, 14 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Most of the article is a trainwreck right now, the entire thing needs a lot of work. Thanks for the suggestions. Garzfoth (talk) 02:41, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Requested move 13 January 2022

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Moved  &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 21:27, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Load following power plant → Load-following power plant – English grammar? -- Beland (talk) 03:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support per MOS:HYPHEN. Rreagan007 (talk) 06:11, 13 January 2022 (UTC)