[glecedric]

In the same thread, there is France with a price of 645€. I don't understand why a country loaded with nuclear reaction can beat Germany in price. Or maybe does it mean that the neighboring country are willing to pay France this much because they are desperate, but in this case why not buy the electricity from Germany at 432€ ?.

[stdbrouw]

A number of reactors in France are down at the moment: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/edf-extend-civaux-nuc...

[srg0]

According to electricityMap, France is importing 3.58GW from Germany right now. And from all other neighbors, except Great Britain.

https://app.electricitymap.org/map

[Arnt]

I think the answer you may be looking for is: Nuclear reactors are unreliable. Compare them to solar, which is very different.

Solar produces power according to sunshine, with no moving parts, and if a panel breaks the rest of the panels go on working, so the failure is a small deterioration in power output. Nuclear plants are differently unreliable, because they have lots of moving parts and elaborate maintenance procedures, and during maintenance a plant produces 0% power instead of that small deterioration. The unreliability is on a different timescale, both better and worse than solar.

France has lots of reactors, but they're not all up, and you can't expect all to be up, so sometimes they'll have this problem. IIRC they had something similar in 2016, which they were able to solve using imports.

[CRConrad]

> Nuclear reactors are unreliable. Compare them to solar, which is very different.

> Solar produces power according to sunshine

So, according to weather. Which isn't exactly renowned for being reliable.

This is about wind power, not solar, but another tweet I saw recently mentioned "Solar availability in mid-winter: 0 %" It's also in Swedish, but the picture speaks for itself. https://mobile.twitter.com/HenrikSundstrom/status/1472654421...

[liketochill]

You clearly don’t work in solar. The panels move on trackers, the panels have to be cleaned of dust and snow, vegetation around the panels has to be cut, inverters fail, etc. there are many moving parts and maintenance required.

[idiotsecant]

Nuke is 'reliable' in a much more important way - the plant outages are scheduled and the generation is scheduled. You can (and do) bet the health of the grid on nuke having the output you plan when you plan for it to be there. This is referred to in generation industry jargon as 'dispatchable' power. This makes a modern zero-sum storageless grid work. Solar is non-dispatchable. You can estimate what power output will be available, you can over-provision generation and store it in expensive batteries, but you simply can not rely on it being there and expect the grid to stay online.

It turns out that regular plant maintenance outages aren't particularly important compared to not being able to properly plan generation.

[hulitu]

> I think the answer you may be looking for is: Nuclear reactors are unreliable. Compare them to solar, which is very different.

You should come in southern Germany to see how reliable is solar when half of the year there is foggy.