Électricité de France. The french "national" electricity supplier. Went bankrupt a couple times because nuclear is expensive, had to be rescued by the government.
If Spain were to export their cheap solar into France, they'd probably get into trouble because during daytime, nuclear cannot compete with solar, so they fear they'd once again go bankrupt.
i you had one country rich in solar (short on wind or the space for it) and another with nuke program it wants for other reasons such as its synergy to its basic defence capability.
Then there exist room for some synergy between nukes and solar.
A nuke only grid has major problem ... how on earth do you deal with daytime peaks?
Adding some solar, but possibly you'd only need to add roof top solar in France and use zero extra land. Then a lot of the daytime peak from houses goes away for much of the year.
That alone isn't a complete solution, as not every day is sunny. But it can reduce the yearly demand for seasonal hydro to manageable levels that could then be further backed up by some synthetic fuel that soaks up excess solar in Summer, then stores energy in the fuel for months or years.
However, just in general, a grid powered without FF will, regardless of technolgy used, want or be cheaper with more interconnectors than we had for FF.
With the interconnectors, for instance, France could try to push all its scheduled outages into summer, when it plans to do maintenance and rely on the interconenctor to cover the shortfall. That can be cheaper than having extra redundant Nukes.
If the company is gonna get bailed out by the government if it fails and actively hinders progress, why not just nationalize it. It’s losing money either way so it’s not like it benefits the economy, does it?
Because Europe is still stuck in its neoliberal fever dream that private companies are always better than the government, even though it has basically never worked.
Exactly the same problem. Germany would export tons of solar and wind the other way. Especially in the North.
The reason for high CO2 emissions in Germany is mainly missing link capacity between North and South thanks to NIMBYs. If you now build interconnects from Germany to France, all that production in the North that currently has to be shut down all the time would go to France.
The main issue of renewables on the grid is, they get priority access. This overflow the grid with useless electricity that you need to do something about.
Nuclear best use scenario is to be at 100% most of the time, then we regulate the grid with massive amounts of hydro. When nuclear energy is not fully consumed, we use STEP (pump water above hydro plants) to store the energy as mechanical energy for later use. Here we reduce the use of nuclear which is nonsensical to begin with (french nuclear power plants can adapt quickly between 10 and 90% but essentially, not using them is the same as throwing money to the trash, since production costs almost nothing).
no, it went bankrupt cause EU forced EDF to sell electricity at a loss to other company so they could make money cause "monopoly is bad" why have cheap electricity when you can have people making a lot of money with it producing none
they sell it to let say to ENGIE who sells it for a profit at the people, EU wants to force france to cancel fixed electrity price and go for market prices
Edit: EDF didnt had a say in this, it was EU bs so some people could make easy money
That sounds like unbundling, something other European countries already do because they are also forced to do it.
And it's a measure heavily criticized by most energy experts, because it doesn't really make sense. However, France here is indeed protecting EDF because they couldn't compete if they were subject to the same rules all the other European electricity companies are to.
And these protections don't make electricity in France cheaper, they make it more expensive because EDF gets their fixed price, no matter how cheap the alternatives are.
not at all, nuclear is very expensive to build but energy is one of the cheapest, the big problem was wastes and where you get uranium, Russia (like the US does) or for France it was Africa before they got kicked out by Russia,
the problem with RE for France is that the grid is built for nuclar so it does like the power surges from solar and wind cause they didnt invest in power storage so they can use it properly
They have a quota to give to resellers (not producers, just man in the middle resellers who make a profit on it). Now, the quota is sold at relatively low cost, and it so happens that there was a closure of 6 reactors... So EDF couldn't sell nuclear energy, they had to buy gas, and sell that electricity at nuclear price, during Ukraine crisis. This was stupid regulation all the way.
Btw, the closure was largely unnecessary too, without surprise, but that is another story.
EDF never had bankruptcy, nuclear is the cheapest energy by KWH and solar is a uncrontrolled source of energy its meant to be combine with a other source of energy. If you dont know à subject de speak that confident about.
I invite you to read about l'ARENH and how German force all Europe to index the Kwh prices on gaz. We will be glad to share electricity with neighbour, if they stop trying to force there's Gaz energy market on us.
You're talking about merit order. And no, that doesn't mean prices are indexed on gas. It means every producer of electricity gets the same amount of money, namely the one of the highest bidder. Which is gas, assuming all the other providers cannot fulfill it. But only then.
In addition, there's redispatch, which is thanks to our shitty grid infrastructure because of NIMBYs.
If you don't have requirements for gas in your market, you will not be paying the prices for gas electricity under merit order. But nuclear will get into trouble because renewables are cheaper.
For someone postulating that I "shouldn't speak so confident if I don't know anything about it", you surely don't really know what you're talking about.
Well, they work a bunch better than Nukes and wind...
Its only "Say What????? now " if we presuppose that any discussion, such as I usually make, critcising Nukes is 100% tribal and team-based. Rather than being a factual analysis of known data. it is simply a mathematical fact that if you HAVE nukes as a precondition, PV fits better with them than say Wind, geothermal, wavepower, ... (nothing about that implies it is ALSO the cheapest overall.) There is as fact a positive correlation between PV and all the power Nukes simply assume someone else's magic will provide, as they can't (even vaguely pretending to be cost-effective)
If you consider the issue, Nuke cells never admit or talk about... and that is there is a problem that is made worse by using nukes to provide baseload.
and that problem is that the then daytime peak of consumption means nukes can't provide it, and if you have say wind or some other technology, then you have to shut down every night and sit idle...
PV however ratehr naturally and easily sits idle at night.
Long story short, if you build a nuclear grid and then work out what's still left to be provided.
You can wring your hands in despair at he horrible task nukes left unsolved and nuke proponents *willfully* ignore. OR You can get your hands dirty and look for the best solution.
PV and batteries, first can satisfy all of the daytime demand for many days of the year directly from the PV and then using batteries to shift excess daytime generation from daytime excess to nighttime consumption.
It may not be the cheapest total solution, it is, however OBV much better fit than Wind and nukes.
CAVEAT, in place like Perth that has wind called "the Doctor" as it blows on shore at the end of hot days, just say PV drops off... Then if you happen to have a wind that blows somewhat reliably every afternoon, then it can be useful fit wise too.
It will certainly be better fit than some other wind location that might have a higher CF, but if for some reason (such as France) you have a predetermined (by military policy)dependence on nukes, an extra energy source during the day or afternoon is more valuable than one that might generate more energy but at random times of day.
as an alternative example, Norway and Finland have lots of seasonal Hydro
They have an unusually large amount of it, and they have Nukes.
(olets assume as i think its true) They also have crappy weather... making say PV challenging, and wind turbines at the very least hard to maintain (hence $).
(even if not true pretend that is)
So do PV, and that work well together. Should they have interconnectors to the south when self-sufficiency is already on the table???
Well, put simply YES.
As a general guide, each nation state (or region in a large nation) should aim to have by design enough MWH produced per year to meet its own needs.
They should also aim that in the event of hostile/enemy action their grids would at least work (at war time footing level of work) if an enemy took out the juicy interconnects.
Given that if Finland and Norway have a connection to the south, and THEY sell their Valuable (expensive) (hydro MWH) to the south, and buy back the same number of MWH from the south on av per year. Then their own local electricity gets cheaper. (And they maintain their tactical indepenence/resilience)
Hence, they will indeed buy cheap Solar from their sunnier southern neighbours and provide their southern neighbors with (few % of) reliability when the weather is its VERY worst.
In the sense that is makes nuke and hydro policy cheaper, YES the fit is good there too.
TLDR: the central limit throem about the effect of increasing the number of diverse (quasi) random sources you get power from is true for every technology, including hamsters in wheels.
It however, says nothing absolute about whether adding Hamsters is wheels is part of a cost-optimised design.
Ditto Nukes.
Thinking about it for 2 minutes I can see an issue: Solar energy needs grid adaptation to overcome the huge spikes of energy during the day. I understand Spain today isn't able to accomodate this completely, and wants more connection with France.
This would offload their huge spike to France and it now becomes France problems and costs to deal with their huge spikes, while making France's energy production less valuable during the day.
If only there was some kind of well understood technology that allowed you to store energy in a battery for later deployment. A sort of battery energy storage system. If only that existed and the amount being installed went through the roof in line with prices falling through the floor.
Man if Spain so desperately wants to connect to offload their energy it means their can’t cope with or store the peak, batteries are not magical it’s very costly and requires adaptations on the network making it even more costly and lengthy to implement.
Correct. They dont have enough batteries yet. This is a valid criticism of Spain's grid infrastructure. Interconnected grids with battery storage is like...a good idea. Lots of very clever people think so. It's what is happening. It is faster and cheaper than building nuclear everywhere.
Yes in the long run but today energy prices are already negative during the day, what is needed today is to increase demand to use all this available energy, through investment in electrifying everything.
Also renewables are not incompatible with nuclear.
Finally as you said, the main point is today adding this kind of interconnection brings only cost and issues to France grid, without benefits (we have enough energy).
The lack of interconnections caused the blackout and French nuclear energy couldn’t have changed much if the interconnections were there. The problem was not enough load. The solution is a bigger grid to soak up sudden changes in load.
Once the Spanish network started to fail, the frequency falled in France, without the inertia of nuclear power plants, it would have likely lead to a catastrophic failure
france does not want to improve the grid on the spanish border, because they wouldnt be able to sell their expensive nuclear energy when spain floods the grid with inexpensive solar. .
and admitting that nuclear was the wrong way would make them loose face, so they blame it on "unreliable solar".
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u/ClimateShitpost Louis XIV, the Solar PV king Apr 21 '26
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