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Comment by realusername

1 day ago

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.

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realusername

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ViewTrick1002  1 day ago

You should look closer rather than attempting a shallow dismissal. I specifically chose to not include dates in 2023 and 2024 due to the maintenance crisis. I also included 2021 numbers.

Looking at the 2022 numbers nuclear power supplied almost 47-49 GW compared to hovering around 52-54 GW last winter.

It does not change the outlook of France and its neighbors relying on 35 GW of fossil based power to manage nuclear inflexibility.

> Nobody cares about the daily demand curve, it's a solved problem, even my parents had a hourly contract since the 80s (!).

So now when you apparently couldn't backtrack more no one cares about meeting a varying demand?

Please. Come with curiosity instead of digging the hole you are in ever deeper.

  • realusername  1 day ago

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France...

    This is the reality of the grid, France is a net exporter of electricity in the EU and has been for the longest time. The only outlier is 2022.

    You have to understand that the debate in France for a long time in the 2000s was that building capacity was not needed because there's already too much of it (!).

    The country also pushed to electric heating to use some of this extra capacity making France one of the highest electric heating share at around 40% (Germany has less than 5%).

    > So now when you apparently couldn't backtrack more no one cares about meeting a varying demand?

    The varying demand always meant the seasonal demand! You are in europe here and not a tropical country. The problem has always been meeting the winter load.