> The author both says that we will find a solution to excess energy (eg. Hydrogen generation), and at the same time says we don't have space for baseload. It feels a bit of cognitive dissonance.

The point is that excess energy from solar especially is essentially free, while excess energy from nuclear or other traditional baseload generators is very far from free.

> I still feel that these articles massively underestimate the amount of energy required in the future

That's certainly an aspect. Here in Norway it increasingly looks like we'll end up with a lack of electricity by 2030 or so[1]. However production is just one aspect, another problem is distribution. Even if we tap into all that wind up north in Norway, for example, most of the consumption is in the south, and there's a huge lack of transmission capacity between the north and south today, with no current plans of building more.

[1]: A big factor here is if we want to use our precious "clean" hydro to electrify the oil platforms or not. They need a lot of energy to operate.

> A big factor here is if we want to use our precious "clean" hydro to electrify the oil platforms or not.

Perhaps a much less comfortable question for Norway is when to retire them entirely and leave the oil under the sea.

Maybe Norway need to build the Shetland interconnector as well as the 1400MW one that's just opened? Shetland is where all the never-built tidal schemes are always planned for.

> Perhaps a much less comfortable question for Norway is when to retire them entirely and leave the oil under the sea.

Oh absolutely. About as easy as stopping a heroin addiction though, I expect. Not only the direct income from them, but about 10% of the non-govt workforce is directly tied to the oil extraction or in supporting roles.

I don't see how flexible power demand (e.g. hydrogen generation) helps baseload power. If you always have a valuable way to use excess power, that just makes variable generation like solar even more valuable and makes it even harder for nuclear to compete.

In the YouTube video in a sibling comment the rebuttal was that most chemical processes are continuous processes and require constant power, i.e. they become new baseload.

Hydrogen generation does not have a flexible power demand, because as you the electrolysis ramps up and down efficiently goes to zero.