alt Hacker News> making a profit by selling valuable nuclear energy
EDF adjusted economic debt at the beginning of 2026: €81.7 billion After decades of massive help (nationalisations building it, monopoly, gift-loans, debt cancellation...
> the profitability of solar operators will sink to the ground due to the overcapacity causing negative price
Wait for storage (V2G...) and hydrogen to kick in.
> France > Germany
France's transition to nuclear power began in 1963 and is now complete.
In other countries (Germany...), transitions to renewables began with the advent of their industrial versions, around 2005. The current context makes these transitions more challenging, and they are still underway.
Therefore, any comparison of their results, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, must be based not on snapshots (which currently favor France since its transition is complete), but on their progress: speed, costs, impacts, etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation-fr...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-based-carbon-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
> decades of massive help (nationalisations building it, monopoly, gift-loans, debt cancellation...
I start seriously question your intellectual honesty here.
- For the last 2 decades, EDF was privatised and give back to the state an average of 2bn€ per year in dividende [1]. That is currently EDF giving to the state, not the opposite.
- The monopoly situation in France was ended in 2007. The loi NOME in 2010 even offred to the competitor of EDF an access to nuclear energy at fixed low price [2].
Worth to note that when the Energy crisis spiked in 2022, the same 'competitors' sent back their customers to EDF because they massively increased their price and did not want to follow the TRV.
> hydrogen to kick in.
Nobody sane of mind and reasonable take hydrogen and Power2Gas seriously in the energy sector: The law of physics simply play against it.
The general efficient is low (practically around 50%), the electrolizers strongly hate the spike style usage pattern necessary for a coupling with intermittent energy, and no installations of the required scale has even been tried.
The only reason this is still on the table is because it gives the gaz industry a reason to drain public subsidies and some hope to stay relevant.
> France's transition to nuclear power began in 1963 and is now complete.
Thats also wrong.
The Messner plan started in 1974 and France was other 55% of electricity production provided by Nuclear in 1985. It finishes with over 50 reactors in 15 years to cover up more than 70% of the electricity generated [3]
The cost of the plan Messmer was estimated at 100bn€ in 2012 money.
Germany started their energiewende in 2005 and 20 years later and 400Bn€ burned, they still do have a CO2/kwh intensity 4x higher than France in the 80s.
The results are so bad that Germany started to subsidies its own industry to protect them against electricity price increase [4]
Again, the results speak for themselves.
[1]: https://www.senat.fr/rap/r16-335/r16-3354.html
[2]: https://www.cre.fr/electricite/marche-de-gros-de-lelectricit...
[3]: https://www.sirenergies.com/en/article/history-of-nuclear-po...
[4]: https://perspectives.se.com/blog-stream/germany-industrial-e...