AndyChee
Yes, exactly. But if we do not have an entire grid-ful of OP HWS, once they have all switched to solar, then "true bottom line base load" becomes just the alumina refineries and other 24/7 users, and night-time only users (like street lights).
One thing I noticed when I moved to Perth in the late eighties which was a direct contrast with the East was that the street lights were turned off after 11.30pm at night. Boy did it get black out there while cycling home from work in a restaurant!! Not sure if they still do this in Perth???
So with the overnight load reduced as much as possible (for example by outlawing the the lights left on all night in most office buildings) then we could better manage that load with solar thermal, geothermal and if necessary, short term peaks coped with by gas-powered fast-start generators.
Rather than relying on virtually a single source for all power, as we do now, we would have multiple sources of power so any one of them failing would not dramatically effect the grid.
To be honest, form my recollections, it's normally infrastructure failures that effect the grid, not the generators capacity. Remember the brown out in Sydeny a few years back when a digger broke one of the three main feeds into Sydney CBD???
Took weeks to repair.
