Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian, a temporary shortage of nuclear power in France forced France to buy substantial amounts of “dirty” coal power from Britain – right at the time French President Macron was taunting President Trump, and pushing for climate trade tariffs against countries which do not share the EU’s “climate values”.
Polluting UK coal plants export power to France as cold weather bites
Adam Vaughan
Saturday 18 November 2017 19.39 AEDT
UK’s last eight coal stations are working to exploit falling temperatures and absence of offline reactors in France to export power across the Channel
Polluting coal power stations in Britain have been profiting from the woes of the low-carbon French nuclear industry this month, according to analysis of energy generation data for the Guardian.
Tricastin, one of France’s biggest nuclear power stations, was closed by the French regulator in September so that works could be undertaken to address a flood risk.
The plant’s reactors make up four of the 39 currently offline in the French nuclear power industry, which experienced even worse outages last winter due to regulatory safety checks.
The operators of Britain’s eight remaining coal power stations appear to have stepped in to exploit higher French prices, exporting power across the channel as temperatures have plunged. UK coal power generation has declined rapidly in recent years under the carbon tax.
Most of the time, France sends electricity to the UK through 43-mile-long cables between Folkestone and a site near Calais, but in November there have been more hours when power has flowed in the other direction.
On Friday, power through the interconnector was almost entirely flowing at maximum capacity towards France.
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The last link to BM Reports demonstrates how dependent France was on imported coal power from Britain in November (view Historic Reports, enter the date range you want to view). The original Guardian post also provides a graph of the interconnector flow between France and Britain.
What a surprise – Macron’s France is a climate hypocrite. President Macron’s climate values only apply when it suits him.
On a positive note, the French President for once put his people’s needs first. But this does not excuse his rank hypocrisy, his hypocritical anti-American climate posturing at COP23, all at the same time France was utterly dependent at times on imported coal power from Britain.
One more delicious twist – a small portion of the coal burned to keep the lights on in France was imported from the USA.
They should have copied Germany and gone more ‘Solar’
http://notrickszone.com/2011/07/04/weed-covered-solar-park-20-acres-11-million-only-one-and-half-years-old/
/sarc
But when I drive the length of France, it seems that each and every hill is topped by windmills. Surely, they provide all the power needed, and free too. Or, is that not the case. one wonders…
You must have seen that many are just standing there – without any rotor-movement.
‘Settled’ consensus politics mired in a Green bog of ideology doomed to sink without trace, becoming the very fossil it professes to spurn.
Ha! Zogby finds that Trumps approval rating is superior to Merkel, Macron, and May.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/europes-merkel-macron-may-less-popular-than-trump/article/2641178
The situation is ironic, to be sure, but no. No, Macron is not a hypocrite because France is drawing power from coal fired power plants in the UK and US. He (France) is simply working with the systems that are currently in place to solve his (their) immediate problems. Just because someone wants to see a system changed, in this case, the way the world generates electricity, it doesn’t make them a hypocrite for dealing with the world the way it is rather than the way (they think) it ought to be. This is an unfair and specious criticism — that is tried all too often in political discourse in this day and age, and it is a huge pet peeve of mine. Just because a person thinks the world should be a certain way, they can’t be expected to act as if it is that way already when it is not yet. People who believe in a flat rate income tax with no deductions, still have every right, even responsibility in some cases, to take deductions on their taxes that they are entitled to, regardless of their position that there shouldn’t be deductions. It’s the same thing here.
Those problems being an ageing nuclear fleet all needing fixing at the same time and with safety issues…
The cost of fixing this and also decommisioning will likely bankrupt EDF
you can bet the Fench taxpayer will be conscripted to the rescue, has the state-owned railway company has been for decade.
“fixing this” shouldn’t be more expensive that it was to construct the whole thing in the first place. Decommissioning to the stupidest idea on Earth; once nuclear fuel is remove the whole place is less radioactive than many natural, inhabited with no ill effect, land.
He’s also sucking up coal power from Germany (and has been for quite a while – Germany was exporting to cover for offline French nuclear since late last year).
This is also one of the reasons Germany has not shut down coal: it runs it for export.
German domestic electricity demand has been falling steadily – yet each year generation and power exports go up.
So Germany and UK can in fact manage with (even) less coal power…
and this is why we haven’t got more nuclear… the cost of maintenance and decommission in later years (and the tendency for human error and human greed to introduce/cover up faults in complex and safety critical systems, causing nuclear power station shut downs)
The only thing why we haven’t got more nuclear, is that gas is much better in every way. Safe, easy to build (a few month, Vs years for nuclear), easy to shut on or off depending and demand (nuclear is much harder to tune), sure to be there for the next half century, and cheap.
Only hydro beats gas, but greens hate hydro, too (because of artificial lakes)