Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…
Most articles about generation are inaccurate in this sort of way. France has huge base load capacity thanks to its nuclear power plants, and the UK has had excess peak load capacity, and we’ve sold each other electricity via the channel DC link, but a lot has been written over the years on how the UK has not relied heavily on nuclear power, or on how France has been fine relying heavily on nuclear.
Whenever there's a maintenance or refuelling operation, comparatively large amounts of power generation goes offline for weeks.
While this can be dealt with through careful planning, the elephant in the room for France is the age of their nuclear reactors. The vast majority or reactors is 40 years old or reaches the end of their design-life within this decade. Even with ten year extensions, about more than half of all French reactors will have reached EOL by 2035.
At the same time there's only a single new reactor under construction right now.
Given that it takes about a decade for a nuclear reactor to go from start of construction to commercial operation, France should really start building about a dozen new reactors within the next 5 years...