Germany exporting electricity to France

Germany has shut down many nuclear power plants. France, in contrast, has still a very large nuclear capacity.

So one might expect that Germany needs to pull some power from the reliable French nuclear plants to make up for the fact that German solar power is not contributing anything in this season.

One would be wrong. A couple of facts from this TAZ article:

On Friday evening, spot market prices hit 15.1 Cent in France. In contrast, Germany’s price was at 11.1 Cent at the time. France is importing electricity right now, while Germany is exporting. One reason for that is that France uses much more electricity for heating than Germany. In the French Bretagne, citizens are asked to reduce their consumption.

On Friday there was high demand of 70 GW around noon in Germany and only about 2 GW of wind power available. There still was no problem whatsoever.

Yesterday and the day before solar contributed between 6 and 8 GW to the grid around noon. Grid stability is excellent, there are many power plants on standby which get no piece of the action. The grid management companies all say that solar contributes a lot to that stability, even in this season.

Thanks to this Tweet by for the link.

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