Stop shutting down nuclear power plants, seriously.
Compare France and Germany on electricitymap.org and ourworldindata.org to understand why volatile renewables don’t help while nuclear massively helps to reduce CO2 emissions!
Compare France and Germany on electricitymap.org and ourworldindata.org to understand why volatile renewables don’t help while nuclear massively helps to reduce CO2 emissions!
Germany is also importing a lot of nuclear power from France.
I'm not saying that Germany is in a better position than France but France couldn't live off of pure nuclear either. Both countries need each other (plus the rest of the European grids) to support their local grids. France is delivering a lot of the baseline power and Germany can help out in times of shortages and overproduction.
While you cannot efficiently adjust the thermal output of a nuclear plant on short notice, you can redirect the steam generated so that generators don't produce electricity. This is down somewhat regularly in Ontario; see the first group (Bruce, Darlington, Pickering):
* https://www.sygration.com/gendata/today.html
Sometimes they're at 100% (numbers don't change), other times they go up and down depending on what the rest of the grid is doing. Nuclear delivers most of Ontario's caseload (see "Supply"), and while mostly steady there are fluctuations: