OT(ish) - how much do we depend on French electricity?

[David]

There seems to be a lot of sabre rattling in certain sections of the press over the current fisheries dispute with France, and the threat of sanctions including cutting off the French electricity feed.

Looking at Gridwatch there doesn't seem to be that much capacity from France.

Is this something of an empty threat, or are there areas which rely heavily on France which are not perhaps shown in Gridwatch? For example the Channel Islands?

Also, don't we feed to France if we have spare capacity due to excess wind?

Just had a look and we are using very little gas at the moment and the nukes seem to be rocking.

Cheers

Dave R

[mm0fmf]

They were suggesting reducing the supply to Jersey not the UK as a whole as Jersey is somewhat dependent on French electricity. Reducing the supply to the UK mainland would have an effect at times of very high demand and low renewable production. But it's 2GW at most I think. It's a dangerous game for France to play, people buying your excess capacity will start to make provisions to get supply from elsewhere as you show yourself to be an untrustworthy provider.

[newshound]

Shifting the topic slightly to gas, it is interesting that Russia declares its interest to be entirely in long term supply contracts, linked in price to various baskets of energy sources (mostly oil). However devious and dubious Putin might be in other areas, I see little reason to doubt that this is their true strategy at least with respect to major energy customers in the west. He does not want to fall into the trap that OPEC did in the early 70's of assuming they had unlimited leverage. Stable exports over decades is what he needs to keep his position unchallenged by the electorate.

[The Natural Philosopher]

At the momen I think its 3GW - less than 10% of average demand.

Yes.

They do rely heavility but they are not actually responsible for Brexit at all.

No, when there is no wind we feed them coal and gas.

EDF has managed to repair most of the capacity

>

[John]

One of the main interconnectors is out of use due to a fire so we cannot import or export as much now.

[Scott]

True about Brexit, but I thought the French were in dispute with Jersey as well over the fishing licences.

[Andrew]

remove 10% of generation capacity and there will be rolling blackouts.

[Tim Streater]

AIUI, only a small number of licence requests have not been approved. These are from people who can't prove that, historically, they have fished in the waters in question. Our authorities are working with those people to try to help them find the evidence that they have, in fact, done so.

Remember it's re-election time for Macron, so a few threats against external elements (i.e., us), always help. It's the usual tactic of weak rulers, find an external threat to unite the country.

[Bob Eager]

And exactly what the Tories did, using the EU as the bad guy.

[Chris Hogg]

Rather to my surprise, this Sunday morning there's hardly any CCGT generation, nuclear is higher than I've seen it for quite a while, the wind is blowing strongly and we're actually exporting a little bit to the French and Dutch. And we haven't even fired up our OCGT's or our few remaining coal generators. Admittedly it's Sunday AM so UK demand is low, but it looks as if we could do very well without the French input. Jersey might be a different matter - the sooner we put in a UK-CI interconnect, the better, so as not to be subject to French blackmail.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

The channel Isles have always relied on France for their electricity. although Sark has a couple of old Diesel power stations, but then they do not have that many people living there. I don't recall where the Guernsey one is, but I think Jersey has a couple. All are pretty old though.

Brian

[John Brown]

Nope, Boris isn't weak and Brexit didn?t unite the country.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

The French do seem to feel everyone is out to get them, or at least their politicians act like that. Life is full of compromises after all, with regard to the fish. it is a finite resource and you cannot say to fish, stay in our bit of ocean, can you? Trying to use other things as bargaining chips is always counter productive, a as somebody else will simply step in and supply the power in this case.

I'm suspicious though, since the French have always wanted the Channel Isles themselves. Jersey is a lot closer to France than the UK. It has also had a love hate relationship over the French building a big Nuclear power station on almost the closest point of France, well away fro French large towns. I'm not sure how you spell it but it sounds like cap de la harg. Brian

[mm0fmf]

According to EDF's status page, a number of stations have been shutdown for statutory outages and refuelling over the Summer and a few have had problems to be fixed. These started coming back online in October ready for Winter. Heysham1 still has 1 reactor off and both Hartlepool reactors are off. They are all expected back by December.

[Chris Bacon]

They have problems. Not only do we import a comparatively small amount of elecric power from there, but they might affect other consumers by s"cutting off" the electricity, to say nothing of legal implications both in contract & international law. suspect that the suppliers would find themselves in court, or the french government would find itself in court, or both. However, I also suspet that the european commission would have a quiet word fwith france to prevent such a problem.

We in the UK have a big problem with our press. It exists for a purpose

- to sell, for money - and it is often appallingly misleading, or even lies. This is true from the daily express to its mirror(!) image, the independent (which isn't), to the daily star to the wretched bbc. People read such stuff, and treat it as gospel. Normally, it ain't, and it is necessary to actually look to see what people actually said, or what actually happened, at source.

[charles]

Jersey,had one witha very tall chimney just to the south of St Helier. The uhf tv relay was placed on that chimney.

[newshound]

I suspect you are getting your information as filtered by the UK media.

As an aside, a few years ago I saw a French newspaper where the Mayor of a French town wrote complaining bitterly that his region had *not* been selected for a new nuclear build, it had gone somewhere else. EDF and the French Government do a very good job of incentivising new build sites.

[Scott]

Do you think we were too hasty in demolishing all the coal fired stations? Should be have kept them in reserve (with a strategic reserve of coal also) or are they just not suited to rapid deployment?

[Scott]

I think Brian is referring to the views (perhaps literally) of residents of Jersey rather than attitudes in France itself.

[charles]

Back in the 1960s, the Mayor of a Yorkshire city wrote to the BBC demanding they install a studio in his city "as befits its civic status" (A studio has just been opened in Leeds)