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

Of course.

There are still some, and they're only suited to rapid deployment if kept warm - hot spinning is the term, AIUI - otherwise they take days to fire up and come on-line. Trying to speed up that process damages the furnaces, I believe. Firebrick doesn't take kindly to being heated rapidly - it cracks up.

Also, apparently coal stockpiles do slowly deteriorate by aerial oxidation. The company I used to work for used a lot of electricity and at one time kept a coal-fired power station and associated coal stocks in reserve in case of power shortages (I believe it dated from the 1930's when they generated nearly all their own electricity). The manager once told me that he wrote off 10% of his coal stocks, annually, to account for the oxidation.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, at 10:37:04 on Sun, 31 Oct 2021, Scott snipped-for-privacy@gefion.myzen.co.uk> remarked:

There are at least a couple of coal-fired stations that are mothballed, and used very occasionally. A month or so ago they were misreported as being brought back into use as the first coal-fired power for a while, when in fact there's another two that have been running on and off all year.

As I type there's no coal though, and 42% wind.

Nuclear is 6GW, which looking at the historic data is about the maximum (it typically fluctuates between 4-6GW).

Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney are all interconnected, and connected to France and there is a scheme in the pipeline (or should that be the cable?) to connect Alderney, and hence the others, to the UK - the FAB link.

Looking at Gridwatch France. A tooltip says Pumped can absorb 1.8GW but it is currently at -2.61GW, why would that be?

Speculation, and TNP will know, but perhaps when the turbines run in 'pump' mode they take less power than when in 'generate' mode. So presumably they would also take longer to fill the reservoir than to empty it.

Quite.

Just the French? Where were you during the Brexit debate here?

Yes, it says they can generate 2.4GW (delivering), but delivering is not published as a separate category from other hydro, and AIUI it is currently absorbing.

It is currently -2.12 (-4.36%) (it's possible I made a mistake and meant

-2.16GW earlier, but still < -1.8, I'm a bit sloppy)

All those nuclear reactors are owned by France and run by EDF. 50% state owned.

They have done a good job of getting the nukes ready for what looks to be a winter of very difficult generation. Only tow reactors out I think...now

Right now with a 16GW gale blowing there is enough wind power.

That's *his* story, and he is sticking to it :-)

Was more before they closed the Magnox stations.

"All in" is 7.5GW more or less. Three reactors still out of service I think.

French don't record output from pumped, only input UK other way about.

:-) The plant manager at (I'd better not say!) continued budgeting for coal supplies long after the entire site was heated with heavy oil.

It's interesting watching the numbers over a month or so how the Hydro output has risen since we have had quite a bit of rain in Scotland recently. With the heavy rains over the last 3 days the output is up a lot.

I was hill walking up by one of the dams built in the late 50s and the water level was so low you could see the extent of the 2 original lochs in the valley before the dam was built and the level raised. I'm not sure if it was low just because we had a dry summer or if they had dewatered the reservoir for maintenance.

charles used his keyboard to write :

Isn't the new one, a replacement for an older one?

Yes. But for "new" read 2004 and for "older" read 1968.

Nick

I mentioned the 1960s

I parsed your paragraph as being about the sixties and the sentence in brackets as a remark about 2021.

Nick