Actually Macron is talking utter bollocks.
Its France who *needs* our electricity when its cold and grey and the wind ain't blowing.
We are currently (sic!) self sufficient in electricity. But we will tale excess nuclear being dumped at low cost when its available!
Funny, that. I thought France was still exporting significant amounts of surplus nuclear to every adjacent country, much of the time. (I don't disagree that they have still succumbed to some extent to the renewable nonsense).
Capacity wise probably but where does all that gas orginate? And the little bit of coal and bio-mass...
If the energy is cheaper than you can produce it yourself then you buy it in. If that energy then stops or becomes more expensive you generate it yourself (unless you a solely dependant on these imports).
Even if the UK were in the EU the EU would have no authority to force the French to supply power to us.
So that would be tidal then? Since everything else depends on imported fuel or is weather-dependent.
Theo
No, it would be nuclear. Stockpiling suitable uranium would not be that difficult.
And reprocessing 'spent fuel' to recover the significant amounts of uranium and plutonium would provide plenty more. And there's still many years' worth of gas under the North Sea, let alone that available by fracking on land, which would soon become acceptable if the lights started going out.
Not al all. we don't *depend* on imported fuel, its just *cheaper*. Extracting uranium from seawater would for example be a lot cheaper than solar wind or tidal power. And there is quite a lot buried under Dartmoor and the Welsh mountains too. For example. We also have frackable gas that could be accessed at the stroke of a legislators pen. Coal is indeed almost run out in terms of being economically viable, but we still have a few viable sites.
And we have a little hydro and wood burning.
They are, but that is an economic issue. France has a lot of nukes and they represent a huge capital cost and they are not particularly good at being turned down, and uranium processed into fuel rods represents less than 17% of the ex works cost of the electricity. So since nearly all the cost of a nuclear power plant is *independent of how much electricity it is producing* they will sell into whatever market they can at any price above around £7 a MWh, because even at that price they are still making money they wouldn't have made if they had switched off the nuke, which would only save them the processed fuel cost.
Ergo, like wind power, and solar power, nuclear power is huge capital cost, moderate maintenance cost, and zero to low fuel cost, so to make money they will sell into any market at any price, and being a thousand times more reliable than wind or solar, they can command a higher price too.
Gas sets by their nature are the opposite. They are relatively cheap to build and maintain, but gas is more expensive. So they shut down the moment the price falls below around £40/MWh.
Hydro ought to be like nuclear, except that rain is limited, so in the UK at least hydro sells into the peaking market where prices are very high, unless they are in danger of overflowing when they will dump what they need to to avoid literally throwing potential revenue down the drain - er - spillways!
Put all that together and you see that gas sets will pipe down in summer and so will hydro, only being brought in to cover peak demand, and balance the vagaries of 'renewables', whilst nuclear power will run the baseload, and if France is offering it at or below the magic £40/Mwh, electricity companies will take it in preference to gas.
So we can easily do without cheap French nuclear power in summer. We just run the gas. In winter they have none spare. Mostly. Whether France can do without the exports, is another matter.
North sea , Norway and Qatar is where all the gas comes from.. In the limit, a stroke of a legislators pen and it would all be frackable here.
There's 10 years worth of plutonium stashed away at Sellafield. We reprocess the worlds fuel rods....
+1 and there's 4 billion tonnes of uranium in the sea, which is a heck of a sight cheaper to extract watt for watt, than British deep mined coal...and we could build fast breeders and use 90% instead of 5%, of the uranium and thorium..
And, for the nuclear lovers, the fuel for that?
So if Macron refuses to sell to the UK, France will sell it to Belgium, who will sell it to Germany, who will sell it to Denmark, who will sell it to Sweden, who will sell it to Norway, who will sell it to the UK via the Norway-UK Interconnector!
Ha, Ha!
Actually they can rather send it to Belgium then Holland and then to us via the britned connector!
Norway connector is still a pipe dream I think
But yes, France cannot dictate EU policy not has it the ability to embargo the UK either. Norway is not in the EU...
I remember S Africa under embargo. Lots of trade with Germany Israel and various other places happened under the radar via third parties.
It is all stupid posturing by Macron, We have seen how powerful the EU is in terms of its outreach into politicians and the UK media, we are now about to see how powerless it is at everything else.
It only really exists because its members have been persuaded to let it exist. Once that goodwill goes, so will the EU. It has no army, it has no navy, it has no air force, it has no power base.
Short of dynamiting the ends of the power cable there is no way Macron can stop it exchanging electrons, any more than he can shut the channel tunnel. These are commercial operations and have a right to operate beyond political concerns.
He knows that, we know that, his target audience is people stupid enough not to know that. Remainers. His only hope is that there are enough left to stop a 'no deal' brexit. The reality is that there are not.
The french end of the interconnector is run by RTE, which is wholly owned by EDF, which is 85% state owned, so if he wanted to be a dick about it, I suspect he could ...
Given each country won't be doing it for free, are we really going to be laughing?
Or is it just another example of where leaving the EU is worth it regradless of it directly pushing up prices to us? Doesn't take long to match that fictional figure on the side of that bus.
Of course all the brexiteers on here voted on a principle.
My guess is the majority voted out believing the lies that they would be better off.
Given that the National Grid buys on price, if the final price is much more than the going rate, we won't be buying it and we'll get the electricity elsewhere or from our own resources. But if there's a surplus in Europe, it'll be cheap: a buyers' market.
But too many loonies on both sides of the argument. So just like Heathrow runway 3, nothing will ever happen.
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