The opening of the European Pressurized Reactor in Flamanville comes 12 years late on the initial schedule.

Summary

France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.

The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.

President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.

Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”

  • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    Something to note about this chart is that ground-mount silicon solar PV isn’t considered for sharing land use with activities such as farming in comparison to how onshore wind is (i.e. agrivoltaics).

    NREL in the US estimates that there are currently ~10.1 GW of agrivoltaics projects spread across ~62,400 acres (or ~7 m^2 / MW).

    Even this being said, I think brownfield or existing structures for new PV is the way of the future for solar PV. There is so much real estate that could be used and has the potential to offset grid demand growth while providing greater reliability for consumers. You’ll need the big players to help with industrial loads, but even then, the growth of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) has the potential to balance loads at the same scale as the big players for the prosumer market.

    Edit: I’ll also make mention of floatovoltaics, or the installation of solar PV on bodies of water, either natural or artificial. This is a burgeoning side of the industry, but this is another area that could present net zero or even negative land use per unit of energy.

      • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        Something to note about your link to solar fences is that one of the cons mentioned is that panels can’t produce power for half of the day because they’ll be facing away from the sun.

        Bifacial panels exist and can collect energy from both faces of the module. We in the utility-scale space use these all the time. You’d want these over monofacial panels for fence applications

          • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            If you’re trying to maximize energy collection then yes you’ll want to face the fence rows NS.

            But there are also some benefits for making use of vertical bifacial panels oriented EW. You get a bimodal energy plot: one in the morning and one in the evening when the sun’s direct rays shine near horizontal (something NS panels can’t collect).

            I’d actually be interested in reading the literature on mixing these types of panel orientations to see what the resulting production yields would look like, and if stakeholders like utilities would find any benefit in them to help better manage grid demand in those peripheral times of the day.