By P Gosselin
The French are finding out that combining nuclear power with unstable wind and sun is not a good idea and is a risk to the power grid.
Spain recently had to learn a similar lesson in a most painful manner.
Symbol image generated by Grok AI.
In a recent EDF report on nuclear safety, Rapport de l’Inspecteur Général pour la Sûreté Nucléaire et la Radioprotection, lead author and former admiral Jean Casabianca concluded that a further expansion of wind and solar energy in France poses serious risk to the country’s power grid.
According to the report, the instability of a weather-dependent wind and solar power supply is a technical and financial burden to nuclear power in France.
Page 13 of the report states:
The massive arrival of new renewable electricity sources (RE), both intermittent and a priority on the grid, has multiplied load variations.
They are not without risk to the safety of the power system (including blackouts), nor are they without constraints on the operation of our facilities. In the long term, they call into question our economic model. (…)
Modulation has gone from flexibility to constraint, with nuclear power having to meet demand alone or in conjunction with hydropower, unless we resort to using thermal and carbon-intensive means.
In addition, load following inevitably has an impact on the machine, which is more frequently solicited by deep cycling. The increase in fortuitous events is not obvious, but it’s over time that the effects will be appreciated.
I believe that the priority given to renewable energies, in a unilateral nuclear-Renewable Energies scheme, leads to power variations which it would be all the more opportune to dispense with, as they are never insignificant in terms of safety, particularly reactivity control, and the maintainability, longevity and operating costs of our facilities.”
Many previously claimed that the nuclear industry could be harmoniously paired with wind energy and thus lead to a decarbonized French electricity mix. But that is proving to be more fantasy than reality. The recent Spanish blackout was a glaring example of what can happen when ideology clashes with hard science and reality.
Many engineers and specialists had warned of the risks and complications involved with nuclear power plants having to adapt their output to uncontrolled, fluctuating energies like wind and sun.
AASSDN site here summarizes:
In the global energy war being waged in France by this pro-wind and pro-photovoltaic lobbying that is contrary to France’s energy interests, this discreet report strikes a real blow to France’s intermittent energy policy. Even if energy and political players haven’t yet fully grasped the significance of this historic technical report, there’s no denying that it will be a landmark and cannot be buried or downplayed by EDF CEO Luc Rémont.”
Hat-tip: Blackout News.
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Gee. No kidding. Duhhh.
Pity that this warning did not come before Spain reached 100% “renewables”.
It wasn’t really 100% all of the time or even most of the time. It was the more ‘dangersous’ some of the time like midday , the off peak period.
And it was never 100% of supply anyway. It was just that they knocked off exports and pumped storage pumping and ignored the nuclear, gas and coal that was providing some grid stability, and claimed renewables were 100% of residual demand.
The wonderful part of hydro machines is that you have a reservoir full of water that you can dump into the turbines almost instantly. It is a bit more complicated with thermal generation.
It is amazing that the grids have functioned fairly well up until now.
It’s probably more difficult to adjust a nuclear plant to variations in power generation from renewables (particularly wind, which can fluctuate very fast) than to adjust a power plant based on natural gas turbines.
A natural-gas plant usually has several gas turbines in parallel, and the flow rate of natural gas to a turbine can be adjusted fairly quickly (within seconds), while a nuclear plant reacts more slowly.
Yes. There’s two types of gas turbine generators, the heavy duty continuous running and light duty fast startup. The fast startup are ideal for standby reserve
And less efficient, I expect. The “need” for more of that “variety” being YET ANOTHER COST of adding wind and solar to the grid.
Coal and gas respond far quicker than hydro, you have to physically open mechanical gates to allow more water to fall.
Coal has to heat the water to create steam first, not a quick process
Coal plants operate continuously, and respond fast to fuel added.
Serious question. Do you know what a steam engine is?
Hydro plants are very quick reacting regarding quickly changing their outputs (LOOK IT UP), much quicker than coal, nuclear, gas, tree burning plants.
And how do you put the water back?
Except opening the flood gates (or whatever they are called) is not so fast.
“It is amazing that the grids have functioned fairly well up until now.”
Not amazing, coal power stations which produce very stable grids – UK used to have 50% plus from coal – with gas in the mix.
Story tip
Concrete spheres for energy storage, California plans a 9-meter diameter sphere
I’m anticipating a deafening silence from environmentalists on the issue of altering the ecosystem by installing and operating them.
Some of these energy storage ideas are better than others (that one sounds a bit iffy). But the fact remains that they wouldn’t even be necessary if it weren’t for Ruinables messing up the grid.
What are they going to do, fill them with reliable fuel?
Maybe spin it to get some grid inertia?
The UK, Germany, Spain, France, etc., in Deep Wind/Solar Do-Do
The Conservative and Labor elites, using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media, brainwashed the people to vote for them for decades.
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Now the over-taxed, over-regulated people are paying though the nose for electricity and HP heating at very high c/kWh, for all sorts of highly subsidized, expensive wind and solar systems disturbing the grid with variable, intermittent electricity, which has caused blackouts in Spain/Portugal, and in many other places.
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Synchronous Inertia
Closing down traditional plants (nuclear, gas, coal, hydro), with rotating generators that provide SYNCHRONOUS inertia is a death sentence for the grid.
Wind and solar provide ZERO SYNCHRONOUS inertia, because their outputs are digitized, then reconstituted into an artificial sine wave with the same phase and frequency as the grid.
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Reactive Power
No AC grid can operate without reactive power
The weather-dependent, variable wind/solar feed-ins to the grid often create transmission faults.
Those faults can be minimized with synchronous condenser systems to provide reactive power TO the grid.
Wind and solar take reactive power FROM the grid
All traditional power plants provide reactive power TO the grid
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Any energy systems analyst would know Spain/Portugal-like problems would eventually happen, before even a single wind and solar system were connected, but naive, woke, non-technical enviros do not want to listen to the pros.
Full speed ahead over the cliff, you go, unless all this wind, solar, battery nonsense is stopped dead by taking away the overly generous subsidies.
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Net Zero to reduce CO2 by 2050 is a very expensive suicide pact.
We need higher CO2 ppm in the atmosphere for increased greening of the world, to support abundant fauna, and to increase crop yields to feed 8 billion people.
Well it’s not that bad in the UK. Ed has promised us that the Net Zero target has no net costs because all kinds of industries will be knocking on the door to receive our cheap wind and solar power.
And heck our current electricity prices are only slightly higher than those in Germany. 🙂
No. Hot Air I think.
https://euanmearns.com/a-review-of-underwater-compressed-air-storage/
Oh boy. This is not energy efficient.
And, yes, the ocean floor is vast, but it is not uninhabited.
An ecological disaster at the tipping point of unintended consequences..
After it gets off its track, I’m anticipating deafening silence from those it runs over. 😵😵😵
What’s the French for Mad Ed? Fou Ed Could have been fouked Ed…
We British need French juice quite a lot.
I misread your ‘juice’ as justice and imagined guillotines on the street corners of London 🙂
France’s electrical energy supply is about 7% fossil fuels. What are they thinking (or not)?
How many bloody years have sceptics of this nonsense been saying the same thing?
But no, we’re the “deniers”.
Fantasy deniers…
It is backwards, and has always been backwards.
Grid priority should be the province of stable, dispatchable power sources. Intermittent sources should be used only for isolated places- off grid, where continuous power is less of a concern than SOME power.
But, common sense has never prevailed in the faux-coupled energy- climate issues.
If only Charles De Gaulle would come back from the dead, and slap the silly out of them.
Silly is not the word I would use, but the other also starts with “s”.
The problem is much more complicated than maintaining sync with the grid.
Everywhere the current and voltage must arrive at the same time, but they don’t travel at the same speed.
That’s what reactive power is about. When voltage and current are out of sync they spend part of each cycle with opposite signs. While they have the same sign the power is positive (voltage x current), but when they have opposite sign the power flows in the other direction – reactive power.
Wake up people, wind and solar do NOT work stop building them and remove them from the grid.
Why, whatever do you mean!? Unreliable wind and solar work fabulously for the oligarchs that harvest their subsidies! Then they can help pay for AOC’s and Bernie’s anti-oligarch tour; easy-peasy, another DemoKKKrat grift financed on the backs of the little people they so completely despise!
Every country is having the problem, as I have pointed out East Coast of Australia has it’s own little problem with the same thing happening.
They have the same problem in Belgium
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/04/belgium-risks-electricity-black-outs-with-too-much-sun-says-operator/
And the Netherlands, and Germany…
But we can do this and we can do that and we can do this other thing to solve these new problems.
Rube Goldberg is smiling.