intresting little detail

[billi]

http://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=france%20electric%20heating%20co2&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.global-chance.org%2FIMG%2Fpdf%2FGC25english-p32to33.pdf&ei=LMQZT9iHEI71-gb-76moCg&usg=AFQjCNHn2SJnAr1Fog9hnWQ4vQhRw-iuwQ&cad=rja

“We have a serious problem with electric heating in France. It
was a mistake to develop it. One could think it was possible to
do it because we have a very large nuclear fleet, but then it
leads to peaks of electric consumption in winter time. […]
It is French folly to aim for transforming electricity into heat,
a nonsense from the point of view of thermodynamics.”

[clockmanFR]

Merry weekend to you to.

On a different subject, relating to sailing buy or not!. Getting me a tea shirt with the slogan, "Get back on Board, Damn it".

[Philip R]

Billi,
The gist of the article in no doubt true, but it does not explain any reasonning why, as it only tells part of the story.

France went Nuclear because its coal resources in the Douai (NE France) were small and almost depleted and was already importing electricity from Germany. Had France retained the Saarland, it would have poseessed greater coal assets.

I am presuming that electric heating in France makes use of the evening off peak tariff using storage heaters and using panel heaters during the day.

One of the reasons the white meter and E7 tariffs arrived in the UK was to level out the grid demand so that large base load units ( Fossil fuel or Nuclear)did not have to two shift so much. This has been discussed on the forum so I will not repeat. The same reasons apply to France also. Also, in the early to mid 1970s, the UK still manufactured gas from coal for domestic use, so the efficiency comparisons ( emission per kWh) were more comparable to each other compared to today when comparing natural gas in heating appliances versus electricity from say conventional coal @ 36% efficiency.

The electricity grids although interconnected are weak at the connections between countries, so power flows in the order of GW to Tens of GW is not possible (yet), certainly using AC transmission without lots of MVAr compensation,  when transitting countries, hence local generation in each country.
PhilipR.