France already has bidirectional power lines to trade electricity with Spain.
They were used to rapidly restore power in northern Spain after the outage and that interconnection actually caused a very short blackout in southwestern France.
The infrastructure France thankfully refused to allow is fossil gas lines, saving Europe decades of gas usage to justify the investment.
While that is indeed not the most objective source, they are actually correct. Even if their stability argument didn’t hold water (it does), they should keep the nuclear plants active and upgrade transmission lines to export to Germany through France and displace coal plants in Germany’s electricity market… And literally save on radioactive waste which coal plants produce tons of.
What does “upgrade the grid” mean to you?
Digging tons of rock and salts to store energy with batteries?
In Europe there are very few remaining sites to build hydro power, and those have serious ecological consequences too… I don’t see to many alternatives. Biogas options are nearly tapped out. There is potential with geothermal using new digging techniques, but they’re mostly in the testing stage still.
How is using batteries better than using said rocks to power nuclear reactors?
There is a limit to how much one can add uncontrollable energy sources to a grid…
I have two answers to give you.
Flamanville is a new generation of reactor that we are testing out after regretfully stopping the large-scale production of reactors in France. Therefore the welding sector had been lacking work for 20 years, many retiring. The same issue goes for many other highly-specialized skills in the field. Americans had to be brought in to fill in for these positions, at high cost. So the left hadn’t been corrupted by Russia into being against nuclear power in the first place, Flamanville would like gone about as well as developing a fundamentally different design can. I will grant you, however, that this isn’t the design I would have liked to see deployed: France used to be developing the Phoénix and SuperPhénix fast neutron reactors until protesters made them stop. These kinds of reactors are cleaner, more fuel-efficient (by several orders of magnitude!), some variants can even consume previous nuclear waste, although I don’t think these two French designs could. These would have been wonderful to have access to. Russia and China have already developed these designs, in large parts with our researchers when they lost their jobs, and we’ll eventually just buy them from them again. Nice plan.
What would you replace these with? Batteries? Once again? Coal? Renewables? How would you deal when, all over Europe, every winter, there are weeks on end with next to no wind nor sun? Should we create new mountain ranges and rivers to store more energy hydraulically? Shift demand? Nuclear is the worst system except for all the others.
What do you mean? The cost of an old nuclear reactors’ MWh is 40-50€, that’s really competitive.
And unlike solar and wind, it produces anytime. As a French person, not only do I think we were right to build them in the first place, I’m annoyed we stopped in the 2000s after the Chernobyl scare campaign, it’s safer than Germany’s coal, which also produces radioactive waste and isn’t properly regulated, unlike nuclear.
They’re gonna have a difficult upcoming few weeks, I wish them strength…
Now it’s time to clean up the other thousands of elected officials corrupting the French political sphere…
Source: I’m a local
You’re right… I fixed it.
The original conservatives were in De Gaulle’s party, which was ferociously anti-nazi.
Although, naturally, as a conservative party they’re now talking about immigration, restricting liberties and the like…
Still a far cry from what Le Pen is up to.
She’s not your average conservative. She’s an actual fascist – linked with Orbán, Trump, Meloni, received millions from Putin, and her party was formed by and still includes numerous nazis, regardless of her rebranding efforts. This goes both for the founding members and the current recruits.
That program should have been Retearn instead of Return to Earn
Yeah, he’s over-positive, it’s unnerving.
Still, that video is good anti-musk press.
I had no idea! I’ll keep reading reporting on the elections, that bastard has ruined European politics long enough now.
Given how many voting cards Orbán gave to non-hungarian nationals, I’m not sure I would call Hungarian pollings élections anymore…
I do hope dearly he gets what’s coming for him, though.
A last point to consider is that the rafale is cheaper to operate than the F-35
Trump’s reverse-Kissinger is looking fire!
Yes, I only listed means to store or produce energy because upgrading powerlines won’t fix power fluctuations : that is due to imbalances between production and consumption, no amount of upgraded to transmission capacity is likely to help.
Load management might help, however. But it’s typically hard to get people to consume more when needed and power shedding is expensive on the electrical operator… Especially since those oscillations were unexpected. Also those things already exist in many European countries.