Actually Germany usually exports power to France. In fact many of the nuclear plants in France don‘t work, especially this year.
And the only reason nuclear plants in France have been down this year, is because as always in the last 30 years, the French Left attempted to kill nuclear and starting in 2015 started de-prioritizing it.
And those plans will soon be online when the maintenance is done and then continue to provide green energy for decades.
The failure in France was to try to get away from nuclear and stop building new plants. Instead starting to use more and more gas.
France had amazingly advanced nuclear plants ready for to be built in large numbers to secure the future. But guess what happen, the French Left (with Greens) killed these programs.
French nuclear works fine, and has been for 40 years. Had other countries acted like France we would be in a much better situation now.
And I for one would prefer some temporarily offline plants rather then breathing lots and lots of coal dust.
I consider evangelical Christians to have fucked up 200% with their response to gay marriage, instead of fighting it they should have made it mandatory, much better for the current spread of untold sexual diseases, not only the ones you've heard of, but thousands of new ones. All because they couldn't form the only bubble (group of sex partners) that actually works, a bubble of two. Marriage.
When was this last true? Is this net export, or is this just some of France using German electricity?
Germany has been actively shutting down nuclear power stations without replacing their capacity for quite a few years.
If Germany is self sufficient for this winter, why are they beginning to impose energy restrictions on government buildings? Why are they having so much issue sourcing cheap energy? To me it sounds like a net import situation.
> In fact many of the nuclear plants in France don‘t work, especially this year.
As the thread suggested, this is because they are addressing a corrosion issue. These will at best not be ready till early 2023.
https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h...
> If Germany is self sufficient for this winter, why are they beginning to impose energy restrictions on government buildings? Why are they having so much issue sourcing cheap energy? To me it sounds like a net import situation.
It is more complicated than that. If Germany runs out of gas this winter, then the lights in Italy will go out, because Germany, despite of all the issues, is a net exporter of electricity.
French have been using the last few years to do maintenance on their nuclear plants.
Going into this winter, Germany will suffer far far more than France.
In any case, this winter is very special. It‘s not a good example to make an argument for one technology or another. Long-term I think Germany is better prepared. A lot of work has been going into heat pumps, properly isolating houses, renewables and so on.
If renewables cannot handle WINTER then that's pretty telling of what quality of a solution it is.
France is in a much better situation. Better isolation, heat pumps are technology independent, you just need reliable electricity.
On the other side, if you have a central heating system, you can replace the burner with a heat pump and leave the rest mostly unchanged. I say mostly, as you want to optimize the whole system towards lower water temperatures to get higher efficiencies of the heat pumps. But this can be done, and if you have in-the-floor heating already, this can be skipped as that works with low water temperatures anyway.
I'm not sure if there is a major difference in insulation. Old houses are in Germany are not great, new houses usually are, and it's probably the same in France.