The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
Baseload is simply the lowest wattage your grid demands in a time period. Solar and wind have not made it irrelevant at all. All of the demand from data centers very much assumes constant reliable power which is in fact a perfect match for nuclear.
What solar and wind have made irrelevant is the assumption that constant supply of the baseload is an addressable market for a power plant. That only works if the supply is the cheapest on the market (something nuclear has even historically struggled to achieve without big subsidies), and solar and wind will supply the baseload much cheaper than any other source when they're running, causing a lot of problems for any plant on the grid that wants to run at a constant output.
There needs to be a market mechanism to ensure there is enough dispatchable spare capacity to meet demand when solar and wind can't supply it. More reliable sources of power are inherently more valuable.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely do the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
Data centers are only 5-10% of all US electric power demand. A significant fraction of that load is responsive to spot market price. DCs incorporate their own battery storage infrastructure for backup purposes and some even sell stored energy back to the grid during times of high demand.
it is not at all a perfect match for nuclear. Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing the nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
Thats what OP means by baseload generation being irrelevant.
Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.
The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...