Agreed. I edited my sibling comment. I totally agree that electric grids and base loads are pretty complicated things. It's just that the base knowledge level is infuriatingly low.

I quite often see journalists writing about energy politics confusing power and energy.

You're not wrong, but I honestly think most don't really even understand the difference between power and energy. If you don't understand that, trying to explain base load is an uphill battle.

Either way, in almost every online discussion I see the term base load is used in the wrong context.

Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.

Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.

Base load exists on the consumer side and unless energy storage ramps up 1000-10000x across the world, I don't see how solar and wind could ever cover it until then. Human power usage patterns don't change that much because we don't change much. You need to be able to provide X energy at all times, no ifs and buts.

Actually, there is one thing, we need super capable and reliable super long distance power grid connections, maybe there's some progress on this front?

Because solar and wind absolutely are unreliable on a local front.

With HVDC and UHVDC lines there are progress on the transmission front. The main question though is the economical race between geographically decoupling your renewable power supply versus storage, this is something we will see play out in the next 10-15 years.

China recently finished a 3300 km UHVDC line from Xinjiang to the east coast with an expected loss of 1.5% per 1000 km.

Energy storage is not a problem in the long term. Making sure that polluting power plants only run 10% of the time is a short term problem that has a solution today.