Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

Re:Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumpt... by aardvark179 on Friday March 26, 2021 @10:37AM (#26592679)

Most articles about generation are inaccurate in this sort of way. France has huge base load capacity thanks to its nuclear power plants, and the UK has had excess peak load capacity, and we’ve sold each other electricity via the channel DC link, but a lot has been written over the years on how the UK has not relied heavily on nuclear power, or on how France has been fine relying heavily on nuclear.

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Re:Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumpt... by qayxc on Friday March 26, 2021 @11:14AM (#26593106)

France has different problems, though. Nuclear power stations need to shut down in summer when temperatures get too high and cooling is insufficient (this is done mostly to avoid killing plants and fish in the rivers).

Whenever there's a maintenance or refuelling operation, comparatively large amounts of power generation goes offline for weeks.

While this can be dealt with through careful planning, the elephant in the room for France is the age of their nuclear reactors. The vast majority or reactors is 40 years old or reaches the end of their design-life within this decade. Even with ten year extensions, about more than half of all French reactors will have reached EOL by 2035.

At the same time there's only a single new reactor under construction right now.

Given that it takes about a decade for a nuclear reactor to go from start of construction to commercial operation, France should really start building about a dozen new reactors within the next 5 years...

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