What's interesting is that they are now a net importer of electricity, but not much. But it's straining the European markets in an incredible way the whole year. My guess, and totally not backed by evidence, is that a lot of countries like Italy etc. were extremely reliant on French electricity, and that they were basically using France subsidizing their nuclear plants and enjoying the deal, not needing to actually take care of their needs themselves. And now it's not there anymore.
What's bad for France here is that nuclear plants basically need to run all the time to be even remotely economical - I read recently the EdF is losing billions and billions this year. Personally I think the situation is a lot worse then what they're admitting. They keep saying all year everything is fine, but then miss deadlines. The futures market was already going really high earlier in the year, but it affected the surrounding countries as well. Recently though it exploded in France only after they again pushed some deadlines back. Even Macron came out recently and said they need to remove roadblocks for renewables and be faster to give permits, which was a pretty big change in rhetoric compared to the usual "we'll build new nuclear plants".
I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe, and people will be surprised how quickly things will change.
EDF’s loss is due to the Arenh (Accès régulé à l’énergie nucléaire historique - regulated access to historical nuclear energy). This is a regulated market that was built to give a fixed price per GWH for new electricity companies.
The goal was to allow new providers to enter the market before investing massive amount of money in new power plants.
The idea was the following :
-EDF provides 100TWH at a fixed price, to allow newcomers to enter the electricity market (which was a monopoly)
- new companies would then invest in new power plants to reduce long-term costs.
It did not work as expected: new power companies just bought cheap electricity and re-sold it without investing in their own plants.
That worked OK for a few years. But this year, EDF had a perfect storm:
- several nuclear reactors were taken down for a scheduled maintenance
- corrosion issues were detected in several other reactors, bringing them down at the same time
- the Ukraine war caused a massive increase in fossile electricity prices.
So EDF still had to sell electricity at a low price as defined by the Arenh, but had to import electricity at a higher price to compensate for their unavailable reactors.
This situation is completely absurd: EDF has to import electricity at high market price to sell it to a lower price through the arenh.
We even see some companies benefiting from the Arenh that are suspected of stopping the B2C segment just to resell the electricity on the European market at a higher price.
That’s why EDF is losing billions this year.
Here is an article explaining the Arenh and its flaws in more details (before the war so quite outdated, sorry I couldn’t find more sources in English):
Don’t even bother explaining that it is a result of an explicit political decision aiming to force the nuclear power industry to subsidize the renewables from its profits. In the end, regardless of your efforts, people will use the losses the nuclear incurs to subsidize renewables as a proof that nuclear is uneconomical, and that renewables beat it handily and are the way to go.
> several nuclear reactors were taken down for a scheduled maintenance
To add to everything you said, the Covid crisis also impacted maintenance, delaying repairs by about a year (source: I've got surprisingly many friends/colleagues coming from the CEA, the French Atomic Commission)
Also, EDF lost a lot of knowledge and manpower during past decades, (most? at least many of) people working on nuclear plants are now sub-contractors, that impacted stability.
The situation with Arenh is even worse this year. The government reviewed it in September 2021 (voted in August this year), increasing the quantity of energy that could be bought through Arenh each year. But this increase happened after most long term contracts were already bought so the extra deliveries they had to do in 2022 are not only a cut on their profit, they are also a massive loss as they have to buy this energy on short term markets which are multiple fold higher than the Arenh price point.
Thanks. That might be true, but it's not what I meant. Generally, the view is that most of the cost of a nuclear plant is paid upfront, the fuel does not cost much. If that view is correct, you basically need to run them all the time to make it even remotely economical. These unplanned downtimes are a killer.
EDF is losing money because of stupid decision like ARHEN that forces EDF to sell electricity at a low price, and also forces them to buy at a high price...
So called electricity "providers" can sell electricity to customers without generating electricity in the first place, and also without transporting it. And at the same time, they get money from EDF through ARHEN!
We have the same in Germany with hundreds of "electricity providers" that themselves own no infrastructure whatsoever, just resellers. As far as I can tell the scheme is to aggressively recruit customers with signup bonuses and more, profit from the wholesale market as long as the prices are in your favor, and should the market turn against you simply declare bankruptcy and start over with a new company.
Europe basically needs to federalize and become a fiscal union like the US or India to stay powerful and get rid of these inefficiencies but are too divided by bad blood from about half a century ago and by vested interests of it's leadership class to do so. While many make the argument of diversity in cultures making union difficult, India has more diversity in culture and languages but has the advantage of almost half a century or so of concerted effort to unify the country pre and post independence - in contrast to the wars in Europe. So India is often able to plan and implement at a national level on some of these economic issues. The amount of development in the last quarter of a century has been nothing short of remarkable. Of course everyone else outside of Europe encourages divisions as a united nuclear armed Europe with over half a billion people in an advanced economy would become a powerful force and nobody has forgotten what colonization by Europe in Asia and Africa entailed. It remains to be seen if Europe residents will realise where there best interests lie.
I suspect language will be a key barrier in changing Europe from a Union to a single country.
Language us a powerful factor in population dynamics (see Canada with English and French) and in Europe you'd be dealing with major language roots.
English obviously, but also French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and so on. I don't see much cohesion with so many languages, and no current country to give up language primacy.
Using language to create an us-versus-them situation is easy, and I don't see this happy union-of-equals easily subscribing to a federated state concept.
France nuclear was only exporting during low demand periods primarily nights and weekends, France needed to import during peak demand. Other countries benefited from lower demand for fuel, but needed to have excess capacity to support Frances peak demand.
> I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe
Maybe, but hopefully not or then global outage must be expected when sun/wind goes down... Random energy production is no subsidy
The problem is France, *not* nuclear, hopefully people understands this: (among) strictest quarantine in the world, no work for many months, social unrest and protests, bad planing ... there would be a lot to say to each of these points, but they all are responsible to the current situation we are seeing with NPP still in maintenance.
I already heard this argument last year, that unpredictable wind and solar energy can work only because they are backed by French nuclear. This year has put a big question mark on that, and I think policy makers are willing to try because there is no realistic alternative in the short term. Even Britain is moving to remove the de facto ban on onshore wind, a push led by Tories of all people [1].
I want to believe that, but France has already recommissioned a coal fired plant. Falling back on coal will delay and exacerbate the pain of the energy transformation. I am an American at a young hip company in the EU and people here only pay lip service to the energy transition. People will keep declaring climate change someone else's problem until they are starving or freezing. If you are in the USA do NOT pin your hopes on the EU leading the way.
Please don't look at short term effects when trying to judge the energy transition. France might restart a coal plant because of issues with its nuclear plants. Germany restarts some coal plants to deal with the gas shortage and to export electricity to France. But this is short term. It is simply not possible to build new plants within one year to deal with the political changes.
Of course everything should be faster and yes, the USA have to find their own way. It's not like even Spain and Sweden can have a similar approach to migrating to renewable energy.
hydropower / geothermal is great but most countries don't have that. Instead, using wind turbines / solar panels have random energy production... Maybe fine in the Caribbean, but you can't power a country like France or Germany with that in winter when it's cloudy, un-windy and cold for many weeks, that's utopian at best. Hence coal fired power plant, instead of NPP.
I'll offer a different take. This is simply the human condition. It's extremely difficult to prioritize something that is working. Any effort put into something that isn't perceived broken is effort that is taken away from something else that is perceived as broken.
These cycles happen in just about everything. A perfect example is business security. Nearly every time there's a breach, it's the same pattern: "We take security seriously"....except we kind of put it on the back burner for the past years.
For anyone who played sim city know this. Sometimes youw won't extend power gens until some parts of the city glowing with electricity icon. And to optimize budget we like to have power gens to be just slightly overproduced than consumption.
> From absolute gold standard electric production/infrastructure in the 70s to barely able to light school rooms in 2022
And they voted, like the rest of the EU, the ban of ICE and hybrid vehicles sales by 2035.
2023, risks of blackouts.
2035: every single car sold is going to be 100% EV.
And the switch to EVs is already happening, which is already putting a shitload of stress on the network. If 0% of the vehicles in France were EVs, there would be absolutely zero blackout this winter.
I'm not saying we should not switch to EVs. What I'm saying is we're simply not ready at all.
> If 0% of the vehicles in France were EVs, there would be absolutely zero blackout this winter.
Data source for this? I don't remotely believe you.
The average car (EV or ICE) drives for ~40km/day, meaning EVs don't need to charge every single day. Also, most EVs charge at night. They are not the problem.
Also, France has approx. 200,000 EVs, out of ~38M of vehicles [0]. A rounding error.
Ironically, given battery availability as the limiting factor in EV adoption, you are far better off for CO2 emission using the one big battery in an EV to power dozens (or more!) hybrids!
> And they voted, like the rest of the EU, the ban of ICE and hybrid vehicles sales by 2035.
Yes, because we need to make things better. And doing so will be difficult, it will be uncomfortable, it will be expensive and it will be very hard work.
And it will be worthwhile, so we should keep striving to get there.
This. Along with the privatisation of the industry and the miss aligned incentives. Gold plated delivery of electricity, but no guarantees of getting it.
I find it insane that a country with as much natural resources, plus unlimited sunshine and space for wind farms has such high energy prices.
It’s also why I’m not sold on electric cars. I’d hate to suddenly be unable to charge it. If someone is really serious about CO2 emissions we need to transform the economy to be reliant on electricity not oil, and the only way to do that is drive the price down close to zero.
Especially worrying for me is the push to get everything on electricity. Only to then do rolling blackouts, or turn things off selectively so energy providers can fleece end users with price hikes.
Alas everyone is only interested in the next 4 years so there is little vision.
Energy infrastructure time horizons are different from politicians ones. Energy policy requires planning and large investments over decades.
There is no incentives for politicians today to say here we are spending $XXB on energy infrastructure now so you can reap the profits of it, in 20 years from now.
Specifically, France got some bad short-term decisions in mid-2000 to not renew nuclear maintenance (hoping to close it eventually), and now all those decisions have to be reversed. But again, reversing it is not going to happen in matter of weeks or months. So, this winter might bring some careful balance distribution (and imports).
The public in the past have invested for the public interests. After the private have do not profiting from old State made investments leaving anything else falling apart. When they reach a certain level of mess they going out, leaving the State arrange the mess and handle the rage, waiting to came back once a new wave of investments will repair the mess.
Unfortunately people seems to ignore that, allowing such model to prosper.
Not sure what privatisations have to do with the problem. My understanding is that it is a combination of a technical problem (corrosion happening at an unexpected pace) and the impact of covid lockdowns which deferred critical maintenance.
Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but I can't quite follow what you're saying. I know it's anti-privatization, but I can really make out the rest.
What does this mean
> "After the private have do not profiting from old State made investments leaving anything else falling apart. When they reach a certain level of mess they going out, leaving the State arrange the mess and handle the rage"
I don't understand the advice of switching off appliances and lights at night. Surely if France has an energy production shortfall, it must be at peak period which is during the day from 9am until about 7pm [1], not in the middle of the night. Particularly given the vast majority of its production costs the same whether you use it or not (nuclear, wind). And even for gas, the problem isn't the quantity of gas available, it is the output of the gas power plants available. So saving gas during the night doesn't help peak production.
On top of the peak production issue, there is also a fuel reserve issue
As half of the the nuclear power plants are down, they have to rely on gas.
And gas has become difficult to import.
France feels both the liberalisation of the electricity production :
Private operators promised to produce cheaper and cleaner power back in the 2000s. But they didn't. Virtually all of them used a scheme (the Arenh system) to get public electricity in bulk, sold to them at a loss and at a fixed price, so that they could compete with the public company on retail prices.
Then the government was still in their privatization bubble, lobbies told them everything was fine, and they began to stop to maintain and to phase out public nuclear power plants.
And now we no longer have electricity.
The backup would be electricity made with natural gas. But you need to save that natural gas now. Russia froze the export of natural gas. And other companies know that gas is in short supply, so prices skyrocket.
In France, a lot of heating is done during the night (Water, buildings with so cold "accumulator electrical heating").
You also need to think that France is not alone. If they can save during the night, this is extra power which can be exported to Germany where the base production relies on coal and gas. This way, Germany uses less gas during the night and can export more during the day to help France.
We are fully interconnected, we need to look beyond "just our country".
But that assumes the blackouts are the result of gas power plants not running at full capacity at peak period because of a lack of gas. I don't believe that is the case, at least not this winter.
> High Commissioner for Atomic Energy from 2012 to 2018 pointed out, in front of the deputies, "the scientific and technical lack of culture of our political class", according to him "at the heart of the problem" in French energy policy.
> The propensity to consider that the technologies under development – hydrogen as an energy vector, smart-grids – can be, in a climate emergency, technologies to be deployed massively, in the moment, testifies to a profound ignorance of development deadlines.
> Conversely, the procrastination on all decisions concerning nuclear power and the policy of announcements while waiting for concrete decisions to start construction show a staggering ignorance of the intrinsic inertia of heavy industries and the need for a stable long-term vision to maintain the industrial tool at the right level
Beyond the political outrage, what's interesting is that France is one of the only countries that makes nuclear safety legislation retroactive. This means that when new measures are decided, all existing reactors need to be upgraded before they can operate. This is not the case in the US for example.
A few years ago during maintenance ops they discovered stress beyond tolerance on heavy steel pieces in some reactors that led to a change in regulation requiring new ways to measure carbon content in those pieces. From what I gathered basically the rule mentioned where measurements would be made to determine carbon content, and of course manufacturers didn't measure anywhere else themselves.
Now the problem is that some of these are >100 tons parts in irradiated zones, it's not as easy as just going in with a carbon meter and taking readings. These have been built decades ago, some in other countries, so the know-how is somewhat lost. Plus they're under heavy industrial secret protection.
From what I gather, EDF is now coming up with simulations based on their understanding of the manufacturing process to prove they're up to code and restart the plants.
And yet we allow extravagant malls all over France to light and heat 24/7 with open doors and no accountability. All streets are filled with large high-definition ad screens & computers that cool and heat all day long. Restaurants and bars can just heat the outside terrace air, etc...
And the liberal take has been: This is fine as long as they're paying their bills.
Blackouts are a solution to consumption surges. We are not seeing surges right now so there is no reason to restrict anyone. We can’t store electricity after all. In case of a surge, the commercial sector is the first being hit, long before houses. Plus the issue is mostly heating, lights consume next to nothing.
France electricity is mostly clean by the way.
> Restaurants and bars can just heat the outside terrace air. etc...
That's not what they announced, the day before an area code will be revealed, and all electricity will be cut (including schools, public utility and telephone towers)
> That’s been illegal for more than a year
There is an exception if terrace area is "covered". Guess what everyone installed in the past year?
France's energy production is not as clean as one may think. There is considerable damage to the environment in countries in Africa, where Uranium is mined/extracted. Probably still better than lots of CO2 output, but not actually clean.
What are you talking about? Did you forget to update your talking points when everything you're complaining about changed?
Stores, including malls, are mandated to shut down lights and screens after hours. Christmas lights and the Eiffel tower shut down at 22:00. Restaurants and bars have been forbidden from heating up terraces for more than a year.
Same stuff in Germany. We ask households to save energy, but at the same time store windows and malls and whatnot are lit up all night long. Maybe it needs a separate higher energy price for businesses to change that behavior.
While I'm sure there's a ton of possible places for commercial use to optimize that aren't being done yet, stores leaving signs on all night was banned by the EnSikuMaV back in August.
I assume the part of the bars which is after the green (“update”) dashed line is previsional.
It shows that more reactors should be restarting in the next few days although several (most notably all 4 N4 still) will remain offline over winter. And Cattenom 1 and 3 are apparently not planned to restart before late feb / early march.
So the issue is that many of their nuclear plants require long maintenance downtime simultaneously? That seems like something that could have been foreseen.
Yes and no. The 10 years maintenance was foreseeable, but during that they discovered a stress corrosion issue, initially on the (somewhat beleaguered) N4 plants but which turned out to be a lot more widespread than that.
It’s also chicken-decisions coming home to roost: maintenance delays due to covid, poor maintenance conditions leading to strikes, and training of new maintenance staff had apparently been slashed because an expected shift to renewables means you apparently don’t need to train staff to maintain 50+ nuclear plants expected to run for decades more.
Maintenance had been postponed during the corona crisis. What had not been foreseen was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the associated general energy crisis in Europe.
> What had not been foreseen was the Russian invasion of Ukraine
The Russian reaction to the eastward expansion of NATO right up to Russia's borders has been foreseen and warned about since the 90s, including by top level US officials such as George Kennan and William Burns and by informed & insightful commentators such as John Mearsheimer. [1,2]
The Russian government made very clear protests in December of 2021 (the last in a long line of such protests) that they felt existentially threatened and would have to act.
> and the associated general energy crisis in Europe
Many people also warned about how stupid the sanctions that Europe imposed on Russia were, with the very high risk that they would harm European states (and their peoples) much more than Russia itself. One person I remember making such warnings in advance or concurrently was Philip Pilkington in UnHerd. [3,4,5]
> A.) that many things cannot be easily foreseen which includes record draughts and the Ukraine conflict.
I don't know. These record draughts are directly tied to climate change and I have known since the 90's that the Pentagon and the UN knew climate change would bring wars, population displacement et resources problems. I think that's where we are.
>What had not been foreseen was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the associated general energy crisis in Europe...
>Can't forsee covid though, nor the war in Ukraine...
Yes. Who could possibly have foreseen that announcing you're stopping imports of gas from Europe's biggest supplier, in the run up to winter, might lead to... er... a shortage of gas supplies.
No-one in the corridors of power in the EU or UK, apparently.
Readit News
What's bad for France here is that nuclear plants basically need to run all the time to be even remotely economical - I read recently the EdF is losing billions and billions this year. Personally I think the situation is a lot worse then what they're admitting. They keep saying all year everything is fine, but then miss deadlines. The futures market was already going really high earlier in the year, but it affected the surrounding countries as well. Recently though it exploded in France only after they again pushed some deadlines back. Even Macron came out recently and said they need to remove roadblocks for renewables and be faster to give permits, which was a pretty big change in rhetoric compared to the usual "we'll build new nuclear plants".
I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe, and people will be surprised how quickly things will change.
The goal was to allow new providers to enter the market before investing massive amount of money in new power plants.
The idea was the following :
-EDF provides 100TWH at a fixed price, to allow newcomers to enter the electricity market (which was a monopoly) - new companies would then invest in new power plants to reduce long-term costs.
It did not work as expected: new power companies just bought cheap electricity and re-sold it without investing in their own plants.
That worked OK for a few years. But this year, EDF had a perfect storm:
- several nuclear reactors were taken down for a scheduled maintenance - corrosion issues were detected in several other reactors, bringing them down at the same time - the Ukraine war caused a massive increase in fossile electricity prices.
So EDF still had to sell electricity at a low price as defined by the Arenh, but had to import electricity at a higher price to compensate for their unavailable reactors.
This situation is completely absurd: EDF has to import electricity at high market price to sell it to a lower price through the arenh.
We even see some companies benefiting from the Arenh that are suspected of stopping the B2C segment just to resell the electricity on the European market at a higher price.
That’s why EDF is losing billions this year.
Here is an article explaining the Arenh and its flaws in more details (before the war so quite outdated, sorry I couldn’t find more sources in English):
https://www.magnuscmd.com/the-arenh-regulated-access-to-fran...
To add to everything you said, the Covid crisis also impacted maintenance, delaying repairs by about a year (source: I've got surprisingly many friends/colleagues coming from the CEA, the French Atomic Commission)
Also, EDF lost a lot of knowledge and manpower during past decades, (most? at least many of) people working on nuclear plants are now sub-contractors, that impacted stability.
So called electricity "providers" can sell electricity to customers without generating electricity in the first place, and also without transporting it. And at the same time, they get money from EDF through ARHEN!
Language us a powerful factor in population dynamics (see Canada with English and French) and in Europe you'd be dealing with major language roots.
English obviously, but also French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and so on. I don't see much cohesion with so many languages, and no current country to give up language primacy.
Using language to create an us-versus-them situation is easy, and I don't see this happy union-of-equals easily subscribing to a federated state concept.
Those mammoth states are only interesting for people with power ambitions, as this last war demonstrates.
Dead Comment
France nuclear was only exporting during low demand periods primarily nights and weekends, France needed to import during peak demand. Other countries benefited from lower demand for fuel, but needed to have excess capacity to support Frances peak demand.
Maybe, but hopefully not or then global outage must be expected when sun/wind goes down... Random energy production is no subsidy
The problem is France, *not* nuclear, hopefully people understands this: (among) strictest quarantine in the world, no work for many months, social unrest and protests, bad planing ... there would be a lot to say to each of these points, but they all are responsible to the current situation we are seeing with NPP still in maintenance.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5b08507d-ae4b-47d1-afb7-ae851f98d...
Please don't look at short term effects when trying to judge the energy transition. France might restart a coal plant because of issues with its nuclear plants. Germany restarts some coal plants to deal with the gas shortage and to export electricity to France. But this is short term. It is simply not possible to build new plants within one year to deal with the political changes.
The long term trends are stable. With the transition to electric vehicles (https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/02/europe-electric-car-sal... ) fuel consumption should also soon start to fall in significant ways. Norway is already there with a decrease of 6.6% YoY (https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statis... ), the rest of Europe is probably trailing by about 5 years.
Of course everything should be faster and yes, the USA have to find their own way. It's not like even Spain and Sweden can have a similar approach to migrating to renewable energy.
I miss politicians who had a vision that didn't stop at the end of their term.
We even had to restart a coal power plant last week...
These cycles happen in just about everything. A perfect example is business security. Nearly every time there's a breach, it's the same pattern: "We take security seriously"....except we kind of put it on the back burner for the past years.
And they voted, like the rest of the EU, the ban of ICE and hybrid vehicles sales by 2035.
2023, risks of blackouts.
2035: every single car sold is going to be 100% EV.
And the switch to EVs is already happening, which is already putting a shitload of stress on the network. If 0% of the vehicles in France were EVs, there would be absolutely zero blackout this winter.
I'm not saying we should not switch to EVs. What I'm saying is we're simply not ready at all.
Data source for this? I don't remotely believe you.
The average car (EV or ICE) drives for ~40km/day, meaning EVs don't need to charge every single day. Also, most EVs charge at night. They are not the problem.
Also, France has approx. 200,000 EVs, out of ~38M of vehicles [0]. A rounding error.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/455887/passenger-cars-re...
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/swiss-government-may-ban-...
Then they will simply push the deadline out.
But far better to have an aggressive timeline for the market to coalesce around.
Yes, because we need to make things better. And doing so will be difficult, it will be uncomfortable, it will be expensive and it will be very hard work.
And it will be worthwhile, so we should keep striving to get there.
Yeah, that's not happening. It wouldn't even happen without the whole energy hoopla going on today, even less so as it is now.
>What I'm saying is we're simply not ready at all.
This is one of those feel-good goals that get moved decade by decade. It's not meant to be taken seriously...
It will just help push some subsidies and sell some more EVs, but nothing will be 100% EV or even 50% EV in 2035.
Australia is exactly the same.
In 10 years there were 7 different Prime Minsters.
The leaders spend all their time bickering about who is in charge instead of actually doing anything.
In Australia they're calling it an "Energy Crisis", which is a complete lie.
Australia has a leadership crisis that has resulted in a crisis of basically everything else.
I find it insane that a country with as much natural resources, plus unlimited sunshine and space for wind farms has such high energy prices.
It’s also why I’m not sold on electric cars. I’d hate to suddenly be unable to charge it. If someone is really serious about CO2 emissions we need to transform the economy to be reliant on electricity not oil, and the only way to do that is drive the price down close to zero.
Especially worrying for me is the push to get everything on electricity. Only to then do rolling blackouts, or turn things off selectively so energy providers can fleece end users with price hikes.
Alas everyone is only interested in the next 4 years so there is little vision.
It doesn't even have a unified government, and until that changes all kinds of expensive self-harming nonsense is inevitable.
Countries are a tribal indulgence - which is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
The public in the past have invested for the public interests. After the private have do not profiting from old State made investments leaving anything else falling apart. When they reach a certain level of mess they going out, leaving the State arrange the mess and handle the rage, waiting to came back once a new wave of investments will repair the mess.
Unfortunately people seems to ignore that, allowing such model to prosper.
Lets say the benefits of privatisation are 10% cheaper widgets or power stations, a politician will aim for 30%. Goodbye future.
What does this mean > "After the private have do not profiting from old State made investments leaving anything else falling apart. When they reach a certain level of mess they going out, leaving the State arrange the mess and handle the rage"
Deleted Comment
[1] https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
As half of the the nuclear power plants are down, they have to rely on gas. And gas has become difficult to import.
France feels both the liberalisation of the electricity production : Private operators promised to produce cheaper and cleaner power back in the 2000s. But they didn't. Virtually all of them used a scheme (the Arenh system) to get public electricity in bulk, sold to them at a loss and at a fixed price, so that they could compete with the public company on retail prices. Then the government was still in their privatization bubble, lobbies told them everything was fine, and they began to stop to maintain and to phase out public nuclear power plants.
And now we no longer have electricity.
The backup would be electricity made with natural gas. But you need to save that natural gas now. Russia froze the export of natural gas. And other companies know that gas is in short supply, so prices skyrocket.
So yeah, we have to turn everything off at night.
Dead Comment
You also need to think that France is not alone. If they can save during the night, this is extra power which can be exported to Germany where the base production relies on coal and gas. This way, Germany uses less gas during the night and can export more during the day to help France.
We are fully interconnected, we need to look beyond "just our country".
> High Commissioner for Atomic Energy from 2012 to 2018 pointed out, in front of the deputies, "the scientific and technical lack of culture of our political class", according to him "at the heart of the problem" in French energy policy.
> The propensity to consider that the technologies under development – hydrogen as an energy vector, smart-grids – can be, in a climate emergency, technologies to be deployed massively, in the moment, testifies to a profound ignorance of development deadlines.
> Conversely, the procrastination on all decisions concerning nuclear power and the policy of announcements while waiting for concrete decisions to start construction show a staggering ignorance of the intrinsic inertia of heavy industries and the need for a stable long-term vision to maintain the industrial tool at the right level
What decay from the excellence of a country that once picked presidents from the Poincare family.
A few years ago during maintenance ops they discovered stress beyond tolerance on heavy steel pieces in some reactors that led to a change in regulation requiring new ways to measure carbon content in those pieces. From what I gathered basically the rule mentioned where measurements would be made to determine carbon content, and of course manufacturers didn't measure anywhere else themselves.
Now the problem is that some of these are >100 tons parts in irradiated zones, it's not as easy as just going in with a carbon meter and taking readings. These have been built decades ago, some in other countries, so the know-how is somewhat lost. Plus they're under heavy industrial secret protection.
From what I gather, EDF is now coming up with simulations based on their understanding of the manufacturing process to prove they're up to code and restart the plants.
And the liberal take has been: This is fine as long as they're paying their bills.
Blackouts are a solution to consumption surges. We are not seeing surges right now so there is no reason to restrict anyone. We can’t store electricity after all. In case of a surge, the commercial sector is the first being hit, long before houses. Plus the issue is mostly heating, lights consume next to nothing.
France electricity is mostly clean by the way.
> Restaurants and bars can just heat the outside terrace air. etc...
That’s been illegal for more than a year.
That's not what they announced, the day before an area code will be revealed, and all electricity will be cut (including schools, public utility and telephone towers)
> That’s been illegal for more than a year
There is an exception if terrace area is "covered". Guess what everyone installed in the past year?
Stores, including malls, are mandated to shut down lights and screens after hours. Christmas lights and the Eiffel tower shut down at 22:00. Restaurants and bars have been forbidden from heating up terraces for more than a year.
But unfortunately, this is not really enforceable because non-compliance is not illegal afaik.
I bet that a lot of it it's subsidized in good old French tradition.
I assume the part of the bars which is after the green (“update”) dashed line is previsional.
It shows that more reactors should be restarting in the next few days although several (most notably all 4 N4 still) will remain offline over winter. And Cattenom 1 and 3 are apparently not planned to restart before late feb / early march.
There’s also an overview dashboard which is just… sad: https://energygraph.info/d/q7IpAJHVz/overview?orgId=1&refres...
It’s also chicken-decisions coming home to roost: maintenance delays due to covid, poor maintenance conditions leading to strikes, and training of new maintenance staff had apparently been slashed because an expected shift to renewables means you apparently don’t need to train staff to maintain 50+ nuclear plants expected to run for decades more.
Due to the response to Covid, not due to Covid itself.
The Russian reaction to the eastward expansion of NATO right up to Russia's borders has been foreseen and warned about since the 90s, including by top level US officials such as George Kennan and William Burns and by informed & insightful commentators such as John Mearsheimer. [1,2]
The Russian government made very clear protests in December of 2021 (the last in a long line of such protests) that they felt existentially threatened and would have to act.
> and the associated general energy crisis in Europe
Many people also warned about how stupid the sanctions that Europe imposed on Russia were, with the very high risk that they would harm European states (and their peoples) much more than Russia itself. One person I remember making such warnings in advance or concurrently was Philip Pilkington in UnHerd. [3,4,5]
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/many-predicted-nato-expansio...
[2] https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-w...
[3] https://unherd.com/thepost/sanctions-wont-hurt-russia/
[4] https://unherd.com/thepost/oil-and-gas-sanctions-hurt-the-we...
[5] https://unherd.com/thepost/gas-embargoes-will-hurt-europe-mu...
A.) that many things cannot be easily foreseen which includes record draughts and the Ukraine conflict.
B.) It makes sense to have a diversified energy mix where no single source is used predominantly.
I don't know. These record draughts are directly tied to climate change and I have known since the 90's that the Pentagon and the UN knew climate change would bring wars, population displacement et resources problems. I think that's where we are.
Without these two things we most likely wouldn't have blackouts
No-one in the corridors of power in the EU or UK, apparently.