Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
There are some limited interconnects linking continental EU with UK and Scandinavia with some trade happening over them.
Limits on transmission result in individual countries generally having significantly different wholesale prices.
The British grid has a North - South imbalance, if I understand that correctly 20% of power would be lost with a 1500km transmission distance.
Replacing all the power of Spain would be very inefficient, even if the connections did exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain) (Power Flow section)
Over 1500km you can keep losses under 10%, but building infrastructure isn’t free. East to West links tend to work better because you can time shift demand and thus build fewer power plants.
Thus, if electricity is scarse and expensive across Europe, French wholesale prices rise as well.
FWIW, the French government forces EDF to sell the electricity to its national competitors at a fixed price of around 50 Euro/MWh, IIRC.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
A better way to quantify grid health would be to identify periods of peak demand across northwestern/central Europe, and then tally who is selling power to whom at those inflated prices.
I have solar panels on my home, as do most of the homes in my neighborhood. However, we recently had to have a natural gas substation built adjacent to the community to deal with the demand surges coinciding with supply disruptions (every time it snows).
Maybe my understanding of how it all works using your own solar panel and the neighborhood's gas lines is too simplistic, though, to answer.
The solar panels just feed power into the grid. This is the standard model used all over the Western US.
Or it should have built modern reactors 20 years ago. Now it's too late, too long and too expensive.
Do they imagine that the radiation / fallout from their neighbor's catastrophe would respect national borders?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Recent...
Some of France's neighbor are asking for the shutdown of some nuclear plants. It's much easier to ask this when you don't have any yourself
Co2 emissions are also global and influence some areas of the world more than others; a nuclear fallout would hit primarily France, even though neighbours would be affected as well.
It was enlightening, to say the least.
But then, it isn’t really a risk worth taking in any case.
[1]: because one can’t just live on mushrooms, but boars do eat a lot of those
This map suggests that western France is fine:
https://www.wsl.ch/en/2020/07/new-map-for-radioactive-soil-c...
I can only recall a few tidbits here in there, including the specifications of a, as of now probably outdated, surgery probe meant to detect isotopes.
It was awesome! Swappable tips, a main unit on a wheeled stand giving it great mobility and awesome battery life! A great tool! Still don’t get the point of learning about it in first year though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh, and throwing dwarves in nightclubs is unethical, even with the dwarf's consent, because human dignity is inalienable.
Right now (https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE), Germany is importing from France alone the equivalent of a bit under two French nuclear power plants at full power.
2. Regarding your comment, I personally don't see Germany importing 72 gCO2/MW power to export 399 gCO2/MW power as a good thing for anyone but coal companies, but whatever floats your boat.
Which is a good thing. Very few countries are self sufficient regarding cars for example, or Kiwis. So humanity invented trading and people trade things they don't have for things they have - so good interconnection is a good thing.
Absolutely.
The net value also doesn’t buy you anything if you have to import electricity due to lack of local production.
France can self-supply itself with electricity.
French nuclear power is such a bad deal for the country they try really hard to avoid showing the public how massive the subsidies are. Oddly enough this seems to have worked, and meanwhile they significantly reduced emissions which is a win for the environment.
Solar/wind, when it products, crashes market prices. Nuclear is supposed to produce at those hours too, except that if it does, it sells at a loss; and if it doesn't, it blows its load factor which is supposed to be its strong point. In both cases, because of the destabilisation of the production equilibrium, caused by solar and wind, the balance of nuclear is endangered.
Yet nuclear is needed to deal with the very common lacks of solar/wind. Hence the global result: prices getting higher. The irony is that the State itself subsidies solar/wind, both directly, and indirectly by forcing the electrical company (which is mostly State-owned, and which also owns the nuclear plants) to buy solar/wind electricity at ridiculously high prices, which is killing its balance and forces it to raise consumer prices.
There was no such problem when there was not a market like the present one, and when there was no solar/wind. Production was OK, prices were low. All was going fine. The problem was introduced by a liberalisation dogma that "had" to be applied to everything and the kitchen sink + a pro-renewable/anti-nuclear dogma (renewable is not bad per se, but the consequences of its rushed development have been ignored, despite being very foreseeable).
Which is in part an outgrowth of bringing cheaper wind and solar electricity sources online combined with inexpensive natural gas. The headline ultra low wind and solar prices hide the fact they are still profitable to bring online meaning it’s selling enough energy at positive prices to add more. It is also profitable to add batteries to the electric grid in California which should offset other peaking sources like natural gas. The question of what becomes of nuclear may simply be it’s largely phased out with some being kept around as a combination of energy source and useful isotope generator.
France could be electrically self-sufficient, Germany couldn't -- whether they would depend on FR/BE/NL/... being irrelevant.
It gets more complicated on a euro per kWh basis as Frances nuclear is much more expensive so economically their losing money even if it looks better in terms of cash flows.
That said, self sufficiency is expensive and generally not worth the costs involved.
Indeed, which is why I wrote “The worst peak being at around 80GW during the winter [...]”.
According to what arbitrary criterion?
Now suppose the domestic production is 100 GW, the domestic consumption is 90 GW and you're not exporting anything. Compare this to when the domestic production and consumption are still the same but you're exporting 20 GW. You go from having 10 GW to spare to being 10 GW short and having to bid for it against the foreign market.
And the prices aren't linear. In oversupply you could be paying barely anything. At 10% undersupply you could be paying twenty times as much if that's how much it takes to reduce demand by 10%.
The dayahead mechanism is described at length here: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/globalassets/download-center/s...
During the intraday auctions, the left-over capacities are considered live, i.e. if there is 100MW of capacity left for France to Germany, you get the first 100MW of the French orderbook merged into the German one. If a trade happens, this capacity is updated. This is called SIDC (Single Intraday Coupling), https://www.emissions-euets.com/internal-electricity-market-..., used to be called XBID.
If by "track each other closely", you mean prices in Germany are reliably 50% higher than those in France[1], then yes, they "track each other" closely. German energy policy has been an unmitigated disaster, creating by far the most expensive electricity prices in the OECD and of course the highest in Europe, whereas prices in France are below the EU average.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[1]: https://strom-report.de/medien/strompreis-deutschland-2021.j...
Even without the EEG, the electricity price would be among the highest in all of Europe. Also, given how much public money coal for example receives in Germany, I think it is a very reasonable argument that the EEG subsidy should not really be considered a fixed part of the electricity price that could not be moved elsewhere.
Now, if you produce electricity by burning gas that you import and gas prices go through the roof then your production costs follow and your stuck.
In the meantime, production costs of nuclear plants have not moved at all. Which makes controlling consumer prices much more doable and less costly, for instance, you can sell that electricity with improved profit margins (and France does export a lot of electricity).
Local power production has a significant advantage. This gets offset when distant locations have significant geographic advantages like hydroelectric power or wind etc, or when peak production or demand varies between locations.