What you don’t know is that in the 2010’s the left wing had a agreement with the Green Party to stop all nuclear by 2050. That’s why we stop financing and maintaining a lot of nuclear plants. It turned out it was a bad idea..
A huge program (55 to 95 billions euros) aiming at upgrading all existing reactors in order to run them for 60 or even 80 years was launched and runs:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_car%C3%A9nage
Governments also sold reactors to Finland (running project, way over-budget and delay), China (2 reactors, over-budget and delay, and they stayed offline or at low-power for a full year after an incident) and the U.-K. (this is a running project, already late and over-budget).
Which ones? Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting?
Disregarding electric dams because, while wonderful, those depend heavily on the country geography and I assume a lot of countries cannot build enough of them. (but we should build as much as we can of those, just don't expect 50% hydroelectricity everywhere)
Norway 98% since 2016.
Costa Rica 98% since 2015.
Scotland 97% in 2020.
Uruguay 98% in 2021.
New Zealand pushing close to 90%.
> Are we talking 90%, an the entire year, without creative accounting?
I don’t know what this means. If a country reports that X amount of energy came from a particular source in a particular year, that means the entire year. And if you believe these countries are lying and doing “creative accounting”, then the burden of proof lies with you to prove it, not for me to disprove it.
Norway: large hydro resources, low population.
Costa Rica: 80% hydro.
Scotland: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424 says that renewable met 97% of energy demand, which does not mean that clean electricity was produced when it was needed in Scotland. Considering that this means the country could run at 97% of its production potential with only RE is what I consider "creative accounting". (the article does not lie but interpreting it that way is mistaken).
Uruguay: only 31% hydro, that's more interesting.
New Zealand: 55% hydro, 13% geothermal.
So except for Uruguay (which does look interesting), most countries mostly use renewable dispatchable sources which are perfect. But not all countries have the hydro potential / population ratio of Norway. We should use hydro as much as we can but we are limited by geography; once everything that can be used is we are stuck with nuclear, wind or solar.
Maybe Uruguay could be an example of country that manages somehow with mostly solar/wind; I need to look into it. Thank you.
Keep in mind it is also possible for countries to export electricity; for the world to be powered by renewables each country needs not produce 100% of it’s own energy demands.
Cars are the perfect source of smart consumers, you can think of a smart consumer like storage since they allow you to shift load but without having to pay the price of the round trip efficiency loss.
They sit still for 22-23 hours per day allowing making them perfect as long as we have chargers wherever you park your car. Which should be an easy mandate to enforce.
> ...as long as we have chargers wherever you park your car. Which should be an easy mandate to enforce.
You also need to modify (heavily) the electricity distribution lines and infrastructure to add the capacity to actually power such a large number of chargers.
Before this new law, in France kindergarden already existed and 98% of children were already attending kindergarten. (It has always been free as well) I don't think this has been done to tackle the low fertility problem in France, but more to enforce a standardization of the education of young children.
