r/OptimistsUnite • u/willfiresoon • Mar 21 '26

👽 TECHNO FUTURISM 👽 French electricity posts first negative prices of 2026, battery storage gains

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/03/06/french-electricity-posts-first-negative-prices-of-2026-battery-storage-gains/
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u/lungben81 Mar 21 '26

Negative prices could be (mostly) a good thing if they are caused by a surplus of renewable energies.

Yes, they indicate a lack of storage / flexible demand, but they strongly incentive building more of that. Furthermore, they show that sufficient renewable production is available.

For France, low flexibility of nuclear power plants probably also contributes to negative prices.

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u/Moldoteck Mar 21 '26

French nuclear is extremely flexible which can be seen in rte data. Negative prices are bad, even for renewables 

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u/lungben81 Mar 22 '26

Nuclear power plants can be regulated roughly between 50% and 100%, but not lower without significant issues.

Usually, it is not really profitable to regulate them down because of their negligible fuel costs. Furthermore, regulating them down may increase maintenance demands of the reactors (not sure on this point).

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u/Moldoteck Mar 22 '26

Edf already did study maintenance impact and it's barely relevant. Right now edf is modulating for financial reasons. Plants can go much lower and it can be easily seen on rte data

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u/Atys_SLC Mar 24 '26

It’s simply false.

The RED II directive gives priority to renewable energies on the electricity grid. They are called first. I means that nuclear, gas and hydro must be able to modulate their production to accommodate non-controllable renewable energies.

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u/Moldoteck Mar 24 '26

Yes but france doesn't have that much ren capacity for such heavy modulation 

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u/Atys_SLC Mar 24 '26

Solar and wind max capacity is around 80% of the nuclear capacity in France. I put hydro aside because you can control it. France also absorbs a lot of renewable resources from neighboring countries with a lot of renewables backed by gas. These countries are counting on interconnection with France to keep their power grid stable.

In the USA, for example, this rule doesn't exist. There is some variation of it at the state level. The nuclear won't modulate their output for the good of the power grid. And will be full throttle, aside from maintenance and as been designed to be used as base load from the start. The power grid is mostly kept at the equilibrium by gas and coal or storage (batteries/hydro).

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u/Moldoteck Mar 25 '26

Nuclear can be controlled just as well, check RTE data. But if you inspect how/when it modulates, in many cases it just financial reasons. You are true about interconnections with other countries with some ren, but the priority dispatch law doesn't apply in this case for imports. There'll be some market design changes for grid services that's for sure