The new French government doesn’t shy away from radical decisions. Earlier this year they announced to shut down more than half of their nuclear power plants permanently, and now they’re also considering to drastically raise their fees for carbon emissions. In combination with their existing power market, these are very unusual decisions.

Most of France’s electricity comes from its 58 nuclear power plants. Most of those were built in the 1970s and 1980s, and, after over 40 years of operation, show visible signs of degradation. Because new nuclear power plants face multiple conceptual issues (they’re very expensive to build, there’s no long-term solution for storing waste products, and Uranium is facing supply issues) France is not exactly enthusiastic about building new ones.

The French environment / energy minister announced in June 2017 that the country would reduce the amount of nuclear energy in the country’s electricity sector from 75 to 50 percent. France’s production of nuclear power has already been starting to fall because of a law from 2016, intended to prop up solar power. This new development will probably lead to the shutdown of a third of its nuclear reactors as soon as 2025.

France also has a flat carbon tax on anything besides electricity generation. It’s been raised to 30€ per ton this year, and it’s going to increase to 45€ per ton next year. This already creates a visible surcharge to gasoline and diesel fuels, but it creates an extremely weird situation in combination with the first announcement.

Let’s assume that French electricity consumption follows the gentle downwards trend over the next eight years. This assumption is potentially affected by two disruptive events, the potential economic crisis, and the potential electricification of the transportation sector. However, these two disruptive events have opposing effects and shouldn’t pose too much threat to the the general downwards trend in electricity demand. Then the lack of a third of France’s nuclear plants will create a huge gap in supply, which will have to be met in some other way. In such a supply-constrained enviroment, rising prices are almost a certainty.

How is this supply gap going to be resolved? France can import power from neighboring countries, but the lines are often already at full capacity. I doubt that additional imports will be able to cover for more than 10% of the lacking supply. Another possibility would be to reactivate the old fossil fuel plants - there’s a lot of idle gas, coal and even oil power plant capacity in France. However, especially in the light of the recent increase in carbon taxes, the government probably wouldn’t be very pleased with such a drastic increase in national emissions. In all likelihood, the carbon tax would be extended to the electricity sector before the traditional merit order would start to take effect, and before international media could shun France for their irrational decisions.

The mainstream opinion seems to be that France will be forced to continue the run time of their existing reactors, in order to prevent regional brown-outs on a regular basis. This is indeed the strategy (?) that Belgium has reverted to. I don’t think this is very likely. Belgium’s actions are mostly reactionary due to an extremely weak and underfunded government, which prevents long-term planning and promotes prolonging the status quo at all costs. France, on the other hand, is well-funded, is led by a seasoned and competent government, and their ministries have been planning out sector-specific details until 2030. It’s hard to imagine that this supply gap would be something that is overlooked in these plans.

Much more likely, in my opinion, is that electricity storage will play a major role in these future plans. Traditionally, a country like France would max out their imports at all times, using pumped-storage hydro to spread the intraday demand peaks over 24 hours. However, there’s only one major dam that can provide pumped hydro, it only provides 1.8 GW (compared to the ~20 GW of missing capacity in 2025) and it’s already in full use today. New hydro storage is out of the question due to geographical and financial constraints.

So what other storage facility is able soak up imports during the entire night, and release the power during the day? The choice is extremely limited. Our most important clue is the time frame: eight years. No other industrial country has had much pressure to bring large-scale electricity storage to fruition, mostly because the incentives were missing (fossil fuel-based power plants are cheap and can be run continuously). Ideas include synthgas storage, redox-flow batteries, and even using old train tracks in mountainous areas to draw train carts up and down. But our specific storage doesn’t just need to be able scale to gigawatt dimensions, it also needs to be mature and it requires a manufacturing chain behind it, so it can be build within eight years.

To my knowledge, there’s only one type of storage that can fulfill these criteria: lithium ion batteries. Of course, not all of the 15 GW of missing supply would be covered by that. I expect an emergency-style expansion of solar and wind power by about 20 GW (peak) until 2025, an expansion of the link capacity to Germany from 12 to 15 GW, and an extension of the grace period for a handful of nuclear power plants. And maybe they get a few thousand batteries from electric cars to participate in their grid as well. But even in that case, for this new setup to work as intended, France also needs to build battery storage in the order of 2-5 GW within less than ten years.

For comparison, Australia’s new battery project - and the biggest battery storage so far - has a capacity of just 0.13 GW. Everyone knows that it’s being built by Tesla, but the second partner in that project? French utility Neoen. For me, the signs are obvious. This is going to be a huge project, and it’s going to start fairly soon.

Image source: Theanphibian