Talk:Load-following power plant

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Sources

I would love to get some sources for this article. It is based upon my years of researching the energy field, picking up a little here and there. Unfortunately, I do not know of any good sources for it. None of the books I have on energy mention load following plants and only one mentions base load and peaking power plants. The sources that I have found are less than ideal. They are almost all commercial websites that confirm a detail or two, and most were probably written by people with no more knowledge than I have. A few of them were clearly written by people who are less knowledgeable (not that I am an expert, the article may contain some mistakes, although some of what people think of as mistakes may just be regional variations). -- Kjkolb 05:32, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your article. I added a reference to Renewable and Efficient Electric Power Systems By Gilbert M. Masters, parts of which can be viewed on Google books. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dZG7EFaOPSMC&pg=PP1&dq=gilbert+masters —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.156.66.163 (talk) 11:59, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Shouldn't there be a section for diesel-gas engine solutions?

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)[reply]