Hillhater said:
.?? Heavily dependent ??
You may want to check your sources.
France, like most European countries, works with its neighbours to balance demand across the European grid.
It certainly imports power from Germany, (and others ), but it is a net EXPORTER of power to all its neighbours !
As often with amateurs you know some basics, but you lack the understanding of the details, but believe that you are an expert. You aren't.
"Dependency" is something that you can not read out of import/export balances you linked.
The last critical shortage of electricity in Western Europa has been during February 2012.
Caused by an almost fatal combination of several effects, the most important:
- Very cold weather increased the electricity demand of up to 100GW in France
- shortage of gas storage capacity because of the cold and speculants wanting to gain maximum profit from calculated shortages (forbidden now)
- Russia slowed down gas exports because of domestic demand
- German gas power plants ha contracts that forced gas power plants to shut down before other gas consumers (new contracts have been made after that event)
- Germany shut down 8 nukes in 2011 after Fukushima
- Gundremmingen C (German nuke) was shut down unplanned. I don't know details about the nukes in France at that time.
So during the worst crises with gas power reducing electricity production in Southern Germany and extremly high electricity demand in France, every available power plant running that could run (two power plants in Germany had been forced to produce electricity by BNetzA) the real situation has been, that France was on the verge of a nation wide Brown-out, but Germany was able to export a few GW to them at electricity prices up to 2€/kWh and so saved them a large brown out.
February 2012 was the last time in Western Europe when demand was almost higher than possible supply and it was France, the large exporter of electricity, that desperatly lacked the capacity from its own power generation.
Main reason for the "French problem" is exactly their high amount of nukes in France. Those produce a lot of energy France can not use and has to export. On the other hand those expensive running nukes that can not follow the load do not leave room for enough peakers so France does not have enough power capacity to meet Peak demand Situation and always had to rely on their neigbours for buying electricity during Peak demand times, mainly from Germany.
The Problem of Feb 2012 was, that Germany at that time was "only" able to provide a few GW extra and France need even more power to meet their extremly high demand than usual.
http://www.pfbach.dk/firma_pfb/bundesnetzagentur_netzbericht_zustandwinter11_12.pdf (in German)
Other situations have been less critical in recent years, for excample drought and heat related problems in France, when they need to shut down some of their nukes at Rhone & Co to save life in the rivers usually Germany now has an excess of solar power to export to France...
Yes, over the year France is a net exporter of electricity, but during peak demand they have to Import.
Main reason for that is their dependency on nuclear power with almost all of them simply are not able to regulate production to meet the domestic demand.