Needed: more battery storage.
French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down.
Daily consumption from Thursday through Sunday is seen falling by an average 6 gigawatts, a Bloomberg model shows. Sunny and blustery weather has driven up solar and wind generation, prompting the grid operator to request that Electricite de France SA take several nuclear plants offline.
While more clean power is needed across Europe to reach climate goals, soaring renewables output and a lack of battery storage mean reactors sometimes have to be turned off during periods of low demand. It’s becoming increasingly common around weekends in France — which gets about two-thirds of its electricity from its atomic fleet — and also occurs in the Nordic region and Spain.
Nuclear generation was expected to total 34 GW tomorrow and 34 GW on Saturday, which is 3.6 and 2 GW below the norm.
Wind output should reach 8.8 GW tomorrow and 12.3 GW on Saturday, 4.7 and 8.2 GW above the norm, while solar output was forecast at 3.4 GW tomorrow and 4 GW on Saturday, almost 0.9 GW and 0.3 GW below the norm.
Exports are expected to reach 15.3 GW tomorrow and 13.7 GW on Saturday, according to EQ.
If you have nuclear, renewables (wind and solar) are superfluous and just make the grid more expensive and complicated.
This is Olde nuclear power generation, that can’t adjust its output.
You still need solar and wind for the heat waves that cause these elderly nuclear power plants to shut down due to overwarm cooling water, or when there is problem where half of France’s nuclear plants went offline in Nov 2022. Very important: nuclear power plants have shut down during heat waves when their power is needed most.
Of the 57 nuclear power reactors in France, 52 were designed and installed over 30 years ago. The sites all use a lot of external water for cooling.
Age of French nuclear reactors:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351839/age-of-nuclear-power-reactors-france/
There were only a few reactors affected by the heat waves + drought over the last few summers, and they mainly reduced output, not shut down completely. New plants are being built on the coast, so it won’t be an issue; some of the more recent plants have small cooling towers which greatly reduce the heat stress on the downstream river ecosystem. 2022 was the worst year ever for French nuclear, % of total power consumed fell from ~75% the previous decade to 62.58%. France became a net importer for the first time in memory, but that was then. All the countries around are back using massive amounts of French power, over 17 GW peak last night. The carbon intensity of the French kilowatt hour is back down to 53 grams CO2 in 2023 – nearly half what it was in 2022, and a fifth of what California managed. In comparison, last year the UK averaged a neat 200 g CO2/kWh, Gemany 400 g, and Northen Italy 306 g, so French nuclear displacing other countries’ own generation saves millions of tonnes of emissions. @ElectricityMaps
IF (you have nuclear)
THEN (wind and solar are superfluous)
ELSE (wind and solar are needed because the nukes are shut down)
Wind and solar still need backup or storage, which works just as well (probably better) with nuclear.
If you have renewables, nuclear is superfluous and just makes the grid more expensive, unsafe, unreliable, unresilient, less democratic.