Major French utility Electricite de France SA (EDF) said it will again extend maintenance outages at some of its nuclear reactors by several months, meaning France will continue to import power and putting more strain on the country’s supply of electricity.
EDF has returned some nuclear units to service in the past several weeks, but has said it expects its older reactors will run well below their capacities this winter.
The utility on Dec. 19 said restart of its Penly 2 unit will be pushed back to June 11 of next year. The unit originally was scheduled to return to service on Jan. 29, 2023. The utility, in a message to France’s grid operator RTE on Monday, said the restart of its Golfech 1 unit also has been delayed until June 11, about four months beyond its original Feb. 18 restart.
EDF also said the Cattenon 3 unit’s restart has been delayed by about one month, and will now restart March 26. The restart of the Civaux 2 unit has been pushed back from early January until Feb. 19.
France, like other European nations, is in the midst of an energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has lessened imports of natural gas from Russia. France is now importing electricity; the country traditionally has been a power exporter.
EDF officials said the operating nuclear reactors are running at less than 70% capacity. The country’s grid operator continues to warn of possible electricity shortfalls as winter continues. The utility on Dec. 16 also said it would delay the startup of a new reactor in Flamanville, in northwestern France, into 2024 as work continues on the project, which already is more than a decade beyond its original 2012 startup date.
It should be noted that France has also been exporting power to its neighbors. Today, as many as 9.5 GW of net power was exported. This is approximately equal to 10 of France’s 900 MW class nuclear plants.
What was called an energy crisis, is now an energy surplus.
No wonder that nations such as Sweden are now looking to build new nuclear plants, perhaps using French designs.
The northern latitudes make much more sense for nuclear power. Keeping homes heated through very long much colder winters is a totally different cost than in much of the US or even most of central Europe.
The much higher cost of keeping homes heated further up north offsets the costs better of building a nuclear power plant. Other wise much greater amounts of fossil fuels will be used per degree of heat.
I was shocked a few years go looking at heating bill numbers in Canada v mine in Connecticut. No comparison.
Small blip more likely!
Last week France was still importing more electricity than exporting it.
For the sake of Europe unity lets hope France gets back to normal after 2 years of abnormal.
When you burn natural gas in your home in a furnace or hot water heater, almost all of the heat is used for the purpose you want. When you burn gas in a power plant, only about 30 to 50 percent of the heat goes to actually producing electricity (depending on the technology and the age of the power plant). Thermal power plants generally reject most of their heat to the environment and it is lost.
In Quebec, yes. Quebec gets 90+ percent of its electricity from hydro. Ontario, which I believe is the most populous province, gets most of its electricity from nuclear.