PARIS: France is facing heavy dependability on power imports since the first cold spell of this winter. Yet, most of the country’s reactors are back online. The US is now also investigating 17 reactors with parts from France that could also be defective.
In the fall of 2016, 20 of France’s 58 reactors were offline, largely for inspections. As of mid-January, most of these reactors were back online, however. The fleet’s total generation capacity is 63 GW, and RTE’s website shows an output level approaching 55 GW, which is near the maximum (power plants generally do not run far above 90% so they can still provide grid services, such as reactive power). EDF’s list of production by plant (zip) on January 11 seems to show that 7 reactors are still offline, which is not an especially high number (only 15 percent of the fleet).
The risk is that France gets a lot of its space heat from electric units, so a cold spell poses a challenge, as we saw in 2012, when Germany helped prevent a blackout in France.
France only has 3,007 MW of coal installed, so it’s coal fleet was also running practically full blast, along with gas, listed at 10,909 MW, just above the 9,181 MW the chart indicates above. The oil-fired capacity is much greater than the 1,100 MW generated, however, at 8,645 MW – so clearly, France has lots more generation capacity, but imports are cheaper than domestic production from oil.
