франция, 95% электричества

[juan_gandhi]

 I've just learned that in 2024 95% of electricity produced in France is carbon-free. It's nuclear, fyi.

Comments

[vit_r]

Неправильно они с климатом боролись. Немцы все АЭС позакрывали -- сейчас топят углём.

[vak]

И правильно, молодцы французы. Остальные страны там же будут через 50-100 лет.

[dijifi]

Not all of 95% carbon-free energy are generated by nuclear stations. Does your source provide separate percentages for nuclear, hydro, wind, solar?

[juan_gandhi]

No, it doesn't. I don't think that article provided the breakdown.

[dijifi]

I can only find the real-time monitoring, right now 69% nuclear, 20% wind, 7% hydro

Edit: During the day solar maxes out at 8%.

https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source

[gegmopo4]

But in Germany it is nuclear-free.

[juan_gandhi]

Good for them. They burn Russian gas and coal, right? Idiocracy.

[archaicos]

Прям дегазификация и деуглезация! :)

[dijifi]

Turns out France sometimes imports electricity from Germany and Belgium.

[juan_gandhi]

This is really interesting; yes, this happened.

[sassa_nf]

Not possible. Nuclear can't cope with load spikes.

[vap]

But well-organized grids of e-cars used as energy buffers can.

[juan_gandhi]

Can you please elaborate?

[sassa_nf]

Nuclear power plants can increase output approximately 40MW per minute. So going from minimum output to maximum for 1.5GW plant takes hours.

Load spikes is like everyone comes home and turns the kettle on (plugs their hybrid car, turns the TV on, goes to shower, etc). You need to ramp up in minutes, not hours. Hydro and fossil fuel plants can do that. Others can't by design and because of the physical processes involved.

[mopexod]

On a scale of France these are not spikes but rather a normal daily cycle with a well predicted hour-to-hour variations.
Considering that France was ~70% nuclear for the last decades, they know how to deal with this.

[sassa_nf]

I don't know enough, I can only retell what my friend from a nuclear power plant told me, and what I read about the future of the power supply.

One might wonder why 70% remains 70% for decades.

I understand nukes can cope with seasonal changes in demand, but not so much with daily variations. They are good as a backbone, but not so good for coping with variation.

[mopexod]

If we take a look at actual electricity consumption of France, we see daily variations of ~25-30% :
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/electricity-consumption-france

This may explain 70% level of nuclear power generation: it does not require any throttling during a typical day, if other ways of generation can be easily adjusted.

I thought that daily variation is a lot lower.

[sassa_nf]

That's a cool graph, thanks.

I am actually surprised that the consumption low is 3.45am, and up to that time it remains pretty high, like the French don't sleep much.

[ichthuss]

Actually it's even somewhat worse than in comment above.

Nuclear plants aren't designed for power regulation. They have very high fixed costs of operation, but really small variable costs, so they are designed to produce as much electricity as they technically can. This is the optimal economical strategy unless electricity prices are below zero. So, nuclear reactor is designed to start, run for say 1 year and stop for maintenance and fuel reloading. It's is optimized for "full power / stop" mode, and its performance in "throttling" mode is very sub-optimal. It has poor energy efficiency, and probably increased wear of equipment and higher risk of accidents.

Moreover, there is an iodine pit. This is one of effects that lead to Chornobyl disaster. It effectively means that after drop in power production, nuclear reactor control is much more difficult, so it's typically safe to restart a reactor no sooner than 24 hours after shutdown or slowing down.

BTW, coal power plants are also no good in daily power regulation (at least those I'm aware of; maybe there are new developments). They also need hours for engine start/stop, and their energy efficiency in throttling mode is so low that it's loss making (coal price becomes much higher than produced electricity price). The only fossil fuel power plants that are good in daily regulations I know are modern natural gas power plants.

So, typically nuclear plants are used for baseline power production (no regulation at all), coil power plants used for regulating season loads (by shutting down some engines), and daily loads regulation is made with hydro and natural gas stations.

[green_fr]

Про 95% carbon-free может быть и верно, но атомной только ~75%.