Read up the Fraunhofer study on how Germany can become renewable:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Hint: we’ll still end up producing more carbon emissions than France. Storage doesn’t exist in the magnitude needed.
Hint: we’ll still end up producing more carbon emissions than France. Storage doesn’t exist in the magnitude needed.
With hydrogen available renewables can straightforwardly get to 100%. Germany has plenty of geology for hydrogen storage. As I mentioned elsewhere, long term thermal storage is also a possibility, with recent developments there suggesting very competitive capex.
(The French have given up on their breeder development program, cancelling Astrid, the proposed next project, until at least 2050.)
Renewables and storage seem much more quickly scalable than nuclear, as demonstrated by the yearly percentage rate of increase in their deployment.
France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.