It’s actually a bit silly to call lighting a “base load”. That’s not how the grid works. Base load is specifically talking about the grid itself and what the lowest load is on the grid. They don’t have an actuarial table where your refrigerator gets put into the base load bucket while your bathroom lights are put in the peak load bucket. It’s all one load.
What power companies are looking at is the demand curve. The lowest level of the demand curve is the base load. That’s all it is.
Things do get trickier with commercial power, especially when talking about machinery. But for something as simple as lighting it’s completely straight forward. Turning off 150MW of lights frees 150MW of peeker capacity which can be used for more useful things like boiling water in a data center to answer questions wrong (I kid).
It’s actually a bit silly to call lighting a “base load”. That’s not how the grid works. Base load is specifically talking about the grid itself and what the lowest load is on the grid. They don’t have an actuarial table where your refrigerator gets put into the base load bucket while your bathroom lights are put in the peak load bucket. It’s all one load.
What power companies are looking at is the demand curve. The lowest level of the demand curve is the base load. That’s all it is.
Things do get trickier with commercial power, especially when talking about machinery. But for something as simple as lighting it’s completely straight forward. Turning off 150MW of lights frees 150MW of peeker capacity which can be used for more useful things like boiling water in a data center to answer questions wrong (I kid).