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Water, atom and demand flexibility
During heatwaves, rivers warm up and their levels fall — and it is water that cools power plants. In France that means nuclear: at the peak of a heatwave the nuclear fleet can lose more than 20% of its output. The remedy is well known, but it comes with a catch.
The same water that dries up is what cools the plants
When navigable canals close for lack of water, it becomes a local tourism problem. Far more serious is that the same water cools generating units. In France, at the peak of a heatwave, part of the nuclear fleet stands idle — and while some of those outages are planned maintenance, the rest are down squarely to the heat and river temperatures.
The remedy is known and works every day: sources that need no water — solar and wind. At the peak of that same heatwave, French PV can supply up to 35% of the mix.
The problem comes back every day, after sunset
And here the catch begins. Air conditioning keeps running; the panels do not. Demand stays, production disappears. This is where the easy answers end.
Distribution networks, storage, new interconnectors — all of it is needed and all of it is priced in figures that are hard to take in. The trouble is that these things cannot be bought any faster. They take years.
The only thing that can be done right now
That leaves one thing, available immediately: consume when there is production.
This will not be an incentive — it will be priced very specifically: in dynamic tariffs, in capacity charges, in balancing market prices. The French may love their nuclear independence, but they will still pay for profile rather than volume. Markets with no nuclear fleet to lose 20% from will pay all the more, because there is nothing there to pretend with.
What that takes is systems that can control, not just display charts.
Summer is now as predictable as winter
Ahead of winter, most of us buy warm boots or check whether the ones in the wardrobe are still good. Nobody considers that excessive, because winter is predictable.
Summer is now predictable in exactly the same way. The only thing that will change is what we buy for it — and the cheapest purchase is the ability to shift consumption in time.
Water is the hidden operating condition of thermal generation, nuclear included; waterless renewables work, but they move the volatility onto the demand side, and the only tool available immediately is flexibility of consumption — priced by the market in dynamic tariffs, capacity charges and balancing prices.
Percee, as an EMOS-class system, delivers that flexibility in practice: it shifts consumption into hours of production and controls flexible loads and storage (cold, heat, battery) against day-ahead prices, capacity charges and the balancing market. This is control, not just charts — and at Solwena's customers it has added up to more than PLN 50 million of documented savings across more than 50 deployments.
See how Percee works →