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by mynameisnull 1253 days ago
Yes but we should have been effectively immune because we have so much nuclear power and we were brought to this situation by a combination of several things: lack of will to continue building new power plants, maintenance schedules being behind due to Covid, and the way regulations are retroactively applied means the technical challenges are substantial in the more aged plants leaving France well below optimal nuclear capacity when it is most needed, even with that our share of gas usage to generate electricity is small and the price of electricity should be largely decoupled from gas in a normal situation.

We still use too much gas to heat our homes, but I believe if we had had the capacity expected we could have reduced that substantially by having people use electric heaters without raising everyone’s electricity bill hugely .. but alas not enough plants online have lead to France feeling the pain like everyone else.