Comment by ViewTrick1002
1 day ago
The uranium reserves does not help when a winter storm rolls through and grid usage spikes. That is "emergency reserves" or the completely black and white "must work 100% or completely unusable" statement you led with.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.
I don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.
Everyone I know with a BEV and an hourly contract times their charging to perfection to reduce costs.
They are of course willing to pay a premium to charge now if their schedule demands it, but that is a tiny tiny subset of the household BEV fleet.
> Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
That's the opposite, France is exporting in winter and imports in summer whenever the Germany overproduces solar and doesn't know what to do with it.
So for now it's France which helps to stabilize the grid of its neighbors.
There's even price caps against that because France would bleed other countries in winter otherwise.
> don't think you quite get how the grid works? BEVs are like the ultimate consumers for a renewable grid since they can utilize surpluses matching supply and demand.
No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
Here's a random selection when the French grid would collapse without 35 GW of their own and neighbors fossil based electricity:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
You need to differentiate beteween exporting when the grid is strained and facing a grid collapse when a cold spell hits.
Click around the weeks and you will find enormous exports happening the week before. Those are the averages you mention. But as we can now both see the French nuclear grid is incredible inflexible when dealing with the demand curve.
> No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.
Please, this is getting ridiculous. I presume you are smarter than thinking that when I put forth people with hourly contracts for their BEVs I am doing it suggesting seasonal storage.
Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?
You know, delay the full charge of the car by a day, two or five if you didn't need to go anywhere and simply worked at home this week.
It seems you are pointing to the 2022 incident which is the only time it happened in 40 years (so clearly not random!). At the time the nuclear plants had unplanned maintenance, the wind power didn't produce much (bad luck) and the solar production wasn't producing (winter). The combination of all these factors made it an exceptional outlier.
Any other time it's France which supported it's neighboring grids.
> Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?
Nobody cares about the daily demand curve, it's a solved problem, even my parents had a hourly contract since the 80s (!).
The current problem in the EU is the winter load.
3 replies →