Nuclear can provide base load. Battery tech or other storage options are nowhere near developed/scalable enough to do that. Solar and wind always needs natural gas or similar as a backup.
Yes, solar and wind will need to be accompanied by lets call them "on-demand" power sources, like gas, water, in the future large-scale storage and of course power2gas for entirely renewal gas production.
By the way, the "base load" was artificially increased in the past to accommodate the mainly slow power plants. This is no longer a requirement, future loads will be more dynamic and more adjusted to the market offers.
So you always have to have some means of power generation available for demand raises at any point and you have to be able to throttle down power generation in case of a demand drop, because otherwise the grid goes down equally as if you had not enough power capacity.
The good news is: renewables can be throttled down quickly, better than most other sources, the bad news is, you can only know about 3 days in advance what the maximum output of your renewables will be and there are days with very low total production. A future grid concept would have to come up with a solution for that. Gas would have been the easy way and probably will be the future when based on gas created via power2gas.
This is an incredible misunderstanding! Honestly, it's like saying that planet Earth is flat.
Did you meant something like "time zones are a social construct"? This true but quite a different claim that the one you made (which is not surprising since what you said is just nonsense).
Conclusion: we need nuclear (and most certainly we don’t need gas).
And before the inevitable comment follows, yes, that may change with future technology. Just like everything else.
In your scenario where we use renewables + gas, water, and storage which of these would be ensuring that we at least have enough to satisfy the loads on the grid that never turn off or vary? Everything on that list except gas is subject to forces we cannot directly control so I assume you would need a certain number of gas power plants to always be in production or idling to satisfy that demand.
Thirdly, why the preference for gas over nuclear?
The big problem with nuclear from the grid side is, that they are the slowest power plants available. Consequently, (and because of cost efficiency) they are run at high power output levels 24/7, the rest of the grid has to adjust by being throttled or fast plants which can be ramped up and down.
Gas is the fastest type of classical power plants (together with water, but that usually has limited amounts). And as the fuel always was on the expensive side, there is quite an incentive of not running gas power plants too much. They would be a good company to renewables, as they can switch between 0 and 100% and back very quickly. And in a grid dominated by renewables, you would only rarely run them at high loads for longer times. And while they emit more CO2 than nuclear plants, they do distinctively less than coal powered plans.
In the long run, you can run gas plants on e.g. hydrogen produced from solar - the recent plans for extending gas power plants in Germany all included the requirement to be usable with hydrogen too.
> [...]
> According to National Grid plc chief executive officer Steve Holliday and others, baseload is "outdated".[7][6]
Great, so what do we do when the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing and the dams are empty? Just have a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks for shits and giggles?
In fact this isn't going to happen and there needs to be enough fungible capacity both internally and in the European grid. Right now, France is highly dependent on the grid, as 50% of the nuclear plants are down.
What if it just requires keeping the existing plants around, and turning them on for 6 hours every 8 weeks, for example?
Yes, that's not 100% renewable, but it gets electricity production to 99% renewable, and that other 1% you can mitigate by doing power-to-gas / direct-air-capture.
Australia is right now fairly close to finishing a 350GWh battery for about $6 billion.
By contrast, Hinkley Point C will take about 20 years to finish, and pump out 3.2GW at a cost of about $20 billion.
No nuke anywhere was ever fully commercial. In every case they depend on heavy public subsidy.