Little Jersey Island is doing its bit to produce electricity for France too. I am being very careful to turn off anything unnecessary. We all need electricity, and when a neighbour needs some help, we all need to chip in without being greedy about the price of a few terrawatts.
Poor EDF, I am not sure they really want to keep maintaining all those nasty old reactors. I also don't think this little crisis puts them in a position to bankroll Hinkley Point. Not one of those reactors is working yet.
I certainly feel France as an agricultural country would benefit from running small local power generators from anaerobic digesters, small wind and sun farms, and get with the subsidies on household backup deep cycle batteries hooked up to the grid. Especially in houses away from the towns and villages.
Jean Payn was a pioneer in his own right, and French!
The French have a lovely tariff where they have very cheap days of electricity, and then more expensive days. The French all go out for lunch when the electricity is on an expensive day! They do their washing on a cheap day. You have a set of lights that tell you what the next days tarrif will be. I guess if it's going to be windy or sunny, they sell the renewable surpluss as cheap as they can. Good thinking! The tarrif trains the user to be aware of consumption too.
As I explained before in posts about our new hybrid car, if we had the gizmo to hook up to the house, which is available from Mitsubishi, but only in Japan, we can use the 10 kw of electricity in the car battery in an emergency. We could also generate electricity by running the engine.
In a situation where we lose power in France, we also can't run the boiler, as it needs an electric feed. So we not only have no electricity but no heating. If we could use our car battery, at least we could power essential lighting, and keep the heating going.
The other benefit to having deep cycle batteries is charging them with cheap electricity or a solar panel for emergencies. Also if they are grid tied, and you decide to sell your electric or storage back to the grid, then the batteries should either be subsidised by way of the connections being done for free, and then a rental paid for the use of them.
France has pretty well gone over to smart meters already.
I shouldn't sound smug about this. I have been banging on for years that we aren't making the right choice about power production.... but I have sounded off the wall in the past, perhaps with these events happening other people may not think I am so mentally unbalanced after all.
Anyway Cows are the culprit for most greenhouse gasses. We need to bottle that methane, it's worth more than the milk! Keep the dairy herd on a rotation between the field and the barn. Get the robot to scoop the poop, and process it on the farm immediately. Those cows do need to get out during the day though, it's good for their moral, and their complexion.