France's 2024 Power Grid Was 95% Fossil Free as Nuclear, Renewables Jumped (bloomberg.com) 83
France's low-carbon electricity output surged to more than 95% of annual power production for the first time in 2024, as rising nuclear and hydro generation squeezed the use of fossil fuels. From a report: Rebounding atomic production together with record output from renewables boosted France's electricity production to a five-year high of 536.5 terawatt hours, transmission network operator Reseau de Transport d'Electricite said in a statement on Monday.
Net exports almost doubled to record of 89 terawatt hours as domestic demand remain subdued due to sluggish economic growth. Electricite de France SA's nuclear fleet -- the backbone of western Europe's power system -- has largely recovered from maintenance issues that worsened the continent's energy crisis in 2022. That's helping keep a lid on electricity prices, even as the cost of natural gas has risen since Russia's attack on Ukraine.
Net exports almost doubled to record of 89 terawatt hours as domestic demand remain subdued due to sluggish economic growth. Electricite de France SA's nuclear fleet -- the backbone of western Europe's power system -- has largely recovered from maintenance issues that worsened the continent's energy crisis in 2022. That's helping keep a lid on electricity prices, even as the cost of natural gas has risen since Russia's attack on Ukraine.
Hurray for France. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well done.
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Yes well done to them. They started from a lucky position at the top made due to a lack of coal and gas as an available resource, excess uranium from their colonies, and it paid off in ways they couldn't imagine. No literally they couldn't image how their decision way back when people didn't know what climate change was would propel them to the top today.
I also would like to congratulate all the people born rich, and all the sons and daughters of royal family.
On a serious note, it's quite disappointing to s
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other countries invest billions in making a change.
Countries should be judged by results, not how much they spend.
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Indeed. Countries should be judged by results. France barely moved the dial since they lucked into a position on the top. They've put in no effort, made very little change to their emissions. So why would you congratulate them? Do you congratulate Donald Trump for having a rich daddy? Or congratulate King Charles for coming out of a privileged vagina?
I'm going to go race an obese man to the end of the street, will you congratulate me when I win, knowing fully well that I do nothing to achieve my fitness?
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Compare to Germany which had a good base of clean energy, yet switched to coal and gas for political reasons.
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I think your causality is wrong. Germany's coal consumption is a tiny fraction of what it was when they industrialised. They were the coal capital of Europe at a time where there was no such thing as clean energy in our lexicon. The fact that they turned some coal plants back on during a war is hardly a criticism of them. Or do you propose just letting the lights go out.
I do agree that the gas use was political though. It was a political strategy championed by the USA, an economic principle that by turning
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Germany did not switch to coal or gas.
It switched to wind and solar mostly.
You must be living under a rock.
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Yet... France is still importing Russian LNG.
Some.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/... [bbci.co.uk]
Thoughts on Trump and Musk on wind farms (Score:1)
(I think Trump knows it too, but cannot admit it for political reasons. )
Trump promised his base the drill thing and leaving Paris, so is obliged to commit to that, but I cannot understand why he would prevent the building of wind farms ?
I thought he would just forget that bit, but it's in the list of executive orders I've seen.
Can Musk really be so two-faced as to support this?
Re:Thoughts on Trump and Musk on wind farms (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think Musk cares what is good for "us"? Like the rest of the billionaires leading this administration, their interest is what is good for themselves.
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But I think he still thinks he is doing good.
And I think he still bases the big stuff on the facts ( while falling for way too much fake news stories <cough> Pelosi <cough> ).
So I think he realises global warming is real and must be prevented.
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Trump promised his base the drill thing and leaving Paris, so is obliged to commit to that, but I cannot understand why he would prevent the building of wind farms ?
I'm confused too but there's not much Trump, or any POTUS, can do to stop windmills on private or state land. Trump can stop windmills on federal property such as offshore windmills, and I'm fine with that since offshore wind is so expensive that we'd be better off looking for something cheaper. Cheaper options like nuclear fission. President Trump appears to be supportive of nuclear fission and so may be taking lessons from France on energy independence and lowered CO2 emissions.
Can Musk really be so two-faced as to support this?
Does Musk support this?
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Trump promised his base the drill thing and leaving Paris, so is obliged to commit to that
Trump has never shown that he has the slightest problem going back on his campaign promises. In this particular case, he may intend to follow through; however, convincing the oil companies to hurry up and start drilling may not be as easy as he seems to think it should be. [politifact.com]
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Trump is not obliged to do anything. He’s already given up on grocery prices. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Pol... [go.com]
What happened to Haitians eating pets? That sure fizzled out quickly.
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What happened to Haitians eating pets? That sure fizzled out quickly.
Not a single pet has been eaten by a Haitian immigrant since Trump/Vance promised to solve the problem!
That's a 0% decrease from before they got involved... but don't get distracted by the technicalities.
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Good work.
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No problem. After all we know that Maldives have been gone under water for five years now, polar bears have been long extinct, Arctic is ice free, and there's a mass global starvation even that already killed billions due to mass desertification.
All of these come straight from IPCC's propaganda arm releases over last three decades. I'm sure that they are completely correct, and our eyes tell us nothing about reality, and in fact everything we see around us is a conspiracy theory.
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It's not making farming more efficient because C02 isn't a meaningful bottleneck plant growth at all. On the whole, climate changing is leading to less arable land due the expansions of deserts and depletion of soil.
Gains in agricultural output is driven almost entirely by the proliferation of technology and more efficient farming practices, nothing to do with C02.
Anyone who knows literally anything about how farming works would know this, which means you're clearly not doing
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>It's not making farming more efficient because C02 isn't a meaningful bottleneck plant growth at all.
Meanwhile, we increase CO2 to around 1500ppm in greenhouses because it in fact is. To the point where it's actually a limiting factor on people working in said greenhouses.
Because it's that much of a limiting factor on plants, as chlorophyll evolved back when planet had around 1500ppm CO2, not the current starvation levels. It's also very arid regions are greening rapidly. As we are slowly exiting CO2 st
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And while some drylands are greening, the rate of aridification is increasing much faster, so the ultimate result of climate change is less arable land and less agricultural output.
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This is the last refuge of the ignorant and opinionated. "I cannot debunk your claims, but I strongly believe they're wrong, so I'll project my problem onto you".
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I expect Musk might have Bipolar issues, and narcissism.
He basically switched from being a mostly left libertarian to a far right. I doubt he is/was any of these personas. However when Starting Electric Cars business, and Space X bringing America back into space. The Leftist folks mostly admired him, and was willing to put up with his eccentricities.
Then 2020 Covid hit, The while the Leftist government was focused on trying to minimize disaster with some strict rules, that hit Tesla, and made it hard for
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What makes you think that? Successful politicians never consider themselves committed to act on their campaign promises once they're in office. One of the nice things about that from their POV is that they can make the same promises again when they're up for re-election and probably get the same people to vote for them again.
Nuclear rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why can't the US recycle its nuclear waste, as France does?
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Since Carter is dead, can we let go of his bad ideas yet, like appointing Volcker Fed chair instead of using COLAs to make nominal inflation irrelevant?
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It's a very dirty process, and expensive. Cheaper to just buy new fuel.
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Did you just externalize your costs onto nature?
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I'm opposed to nuclear in general. Reprocessing fuel is particularly dirty and dangerous.
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Quite the contrary. This is one of the way to reduce waste.
The fact that you admit being opposed to nuclear in general explains why you want to push the narrative that reprocessing fuel is dirty/dangerous.
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I'm opposed to nuclear in general for many reasons, and the fact that reprocessing fuel is dirty/dangerous is just one of them.
"After reprocessing, the remaining material will be in several different waste forms, and the total volume of nuclear waste will have been increased by a factor of twenty or more, including low-level waste and plutonium-contaminated waste."
"The Energy Department recently released an industry estimate that a reprocessing plant with an annual capacity of 2,000 metric tons of spent fue
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a reprocessing plant with an annual capacity of 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel would cost up to $20 billion to build—and the U.S. would need two of these to reprocess all its spent fue
A really small price, especially if you compare it to the 500 billions spent by Germany on renewables, and for which they still emit 10-11 times more CO2eq/kWh than France.
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I see that you are dishonestly trying to shift the goalposts. Meanwhile, "Reprocessing fuel is particularly dirty and dangerous."
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Well, you dishonestly throw figures around, without providing context.
You oversimplify the issue, because you forget that Gen IV nuclear plants, which could have been built decades ago if not for the opposition of dumbasses, are designed to work in closed fuel cycles (reprocessed fuel is reused, which indeed minimizes long-lived radioactive waste. By combining reprocessing with Gen IV reactors, long-lived isotopes in spent fuel can be transmuted into shorter-lived isotopes, reducing the long-term hazard of
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Not the slightest bit interested in your crap.
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Cry baby, cry
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Wikipedia: ãSIn 2019, France exported a total of 57 TWh of electricity with its neighbouring countries. Since 1990, each year, France roughly exports 10% of its annual production. Its annual exchange sold has always remained positive.[7]ã
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This is heavily misleading. France exports when it's not windy and sunny in Germany, and has to import (due to EU regulation on priority dispatch rights for specific generator types and centralized grids) when it's windy and sunny. If priority dispatch was to be scrapped, France would export far more energy, as wind and solar would not be allowed to sell all their production before anyone else is allowed to sell any on spot markets.
Re: Nuclear rocks! (Score:1)
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This is the popular propaganda narrative, but it's incorrect. Price is determined in part by availability, yes, which is why it's a lie that is being presented as a sort of half truth.
Reality is that before price determining mechanisms of supply and demand are allowed to come in effect, come rules on priority dispatch. That is rules on who is allowed on the spot market to sell in the first place. Having these rules prioritize intermittents over all other forms of power generation is so crucial, that you wil
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Here is the exhaustive list of months where France was a net importer of electricity, 2015-2024:
Dec. 2016 (very close to zero), Sept. 2020, Nov 2021, Dec 2021
Negative nearly all year 2022 (Feb and May positive)
End of the list.
Source: RTE https://analysesetdonnees.rte-... [rte-france.com]
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To quote myself from another post:
This is heavily misleading. France exports when it's not windy and sunny in Germany, and has to import (due to EU regulation on priority dispatch rights for specific generator types and centralized grids) when it's windy and sunny. If priority dispatch was to be scrapped, France would export far more energy, as wind and solar would not be allowed to sell all their production before anyone else is allowed to sell any on spot markets.
Essentially this is "EU leads the world in
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Taxpayer money may have helped build the initial nuclear fleet, but for many years, electricity was cheaper than in many neighboring countries, and dividents (or benefits, before EDF was privatized) were that much money in the state's budget that did not need to come from the taxpayer.
And with the ARENH mechanism, the nuclear industry is actually forced to subsidize purely finance-based companies which produce nothing. The sums of money that were injected in the industry in the last years by the state are l
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Also January and November, 2017.
Expect in .. (Score:2)
"In the summertime, when the weather is fine" ;)
Then they buy electricity
Peak in Winter, not Summer (Score:3)
Also European power loads are typically larger in the winter than summer because air conditioning is still much less common than in the US and, even when there is air conditioning, it is typically small wall/window units
What could’ve been (Score:3)
Although now renewables with batteries are much cheaper than nuclear, France is a clear example of what could’ve been possible if we had continued pursuing nuclear plant expansion half a century ago. Yes there are difficulties and costs associated with maintaining or securing or shutting down nuclear plants, but the reality is in the *here and now* France is leading the developed world in not producing CO2 emissions. We could’ve transitioned from zero carbon nuclear to zero carbon renewables and saved the earth from a huge portion of inevitable warming.
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Also forgot to add, renewables still aren’t sufficient for winter months. Perhaps we could use solar and wind energy to produce biofuels and burn those in the winter, but it’s still speculative.
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Why didn't the US recycle nuclear waste as France does?
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Jimmy Carter. The president, not the submarine.
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Why not blame Carter for solar power too since he put those on the White House?
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Because that wasn't a decree by a president that required bureaucrats running the government to act in a specific way for decades after being signed.
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It started with "Kennedy banned reprocessing due to proliferation concerns" and ends with "more expensive than just using fresh material"
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(I am a French citizen.) While I mostly agree with you, France still does not have a clear plan on what to do with nuclear plants shutting down and clean up. They are putting money aside for the expected clean up cost. But realistically we don't have accurate estimates of what the cost will actually be. Hopefully we are in the right order of magnitude; but who knows?
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I don’t think there’s any way to pay for CO2 that’s already been emitted or global temps that have already risen. Shutting down nuclear plants is an expensive headache but far less of one than the exponentially warming globe.
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Utility can install solar for $1/watt. Batteries come down in cost every year. Really their costs have plummeted in the last 10 years and new technologies are on the bring of being commercialized. Most solar plus facilities built with battery storage are designed for 4 hours of nominal power storage. Recently due to falling battery costs there have been projects designed for 6 hours of storage.
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Next step (Score:2)
They need to rapidly switch to electric cars ASAP. Don’t fuck it up.
Nuclear is fossil fuel, no? (Score:2)
Or does Uranium grow on trees? Am I missing something here? ... This is a terminology nitpick but this is also slashdot, therefore ...
Either way, nuclear definitely isn't renewable.
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Or does Uranium grow on trees? Am I missing something here? ... This is a terminology nitpick but this is also slashdot, therefore ...
Either way, nuclear definitely isn't renewable.
A fossil is the remains or traces of a living thing, buried in stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Fossil fuels" are the remains of living things, that by a quirk of geology are concentrated in carbon and hydrocarbons, directly derived from those living things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Uranium in its elemental forms or its mineral compounds, was never part of the biology of any living organism, let alone a major percentage of its elemental composition.
Is it possible you are conflating the words
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Either way, nuclear definitely isn't renewable.
Nuclear technically isn't renewable. But there are orders of magnitude more nuclear fuels present in the Earth's crust to give us more energy than all the fossil fuels we have ever mined, or are available in known reserves. So it's a bit like saying solar energy isn't "renewable" because the Sun will eventually burn out.
More info here: https://wna.origindigital.co/i... [origindigital.co]
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Either way, nuclear definitely isn't renewable.
As the politicians have decreed it will work? No, it's not--we throw away something like 95% of our nuclear fuel. If we had a sane fuel cycle? Billions of years worth of energy, which should meet any reasonable definition of "renewable."
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That’s the plot of the 2022 Chinese big budget movie Wandering Earth.