French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is.
British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
Solar is corellated around time of day on a large scale and cloud cover on a more localized scale. Lack of wind sometimes happens to fairly large regions; interconnections to farther away wind farms helps though.
Weather extremes outside the design can result in outages for all kinds of plants though, so a relatively geographically small and isolated grid like Texas, that has many plants unprepared for cold will likely have outages at plants of all types during a bad cold snap; a particularly bad heat wave might cause issues as well.
So while grid operators have to be constantly adjusting for solar & wind output variations, they can do so without panic and without customers noticing.
Reactor shutdowns, while rare, are sometimes very unexpected and drop a lot of capacity from the grid very quickly.
Unless you start mass manufacturing them and the identical reactors start failing in identical ways...
Outages at multiple nuclear plants can be correlated. Right now: https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...
Japan has seen a decade-long shutdown of most plants following a single incident.
> British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.
Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point".
Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time.
I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing.
Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.
The people could demand a resolution to the politician's issues which are holding five turbines in Montreal that could be installed in a pipeline which supplies gas to parts of Europe. It is almost like some political segments don't want a resolution before winter.
Edit: I had read one was returned, five being repaired, and Germany restarting ten coal plants. https://globalnews.ca/news/9002839/canada-turbines-return-ru...
It is almost like the news is more interested in reporting on ongoing problems than solved ones.
I think the Kremlin is expecting the German electorate to push pressure on their government to ask for a return to the "normal" flow of gas, Ukraine be damned.
That seems like a reasonable bet, but I'm not going to rule surprises out any more.