I realize that this is WAY BEYOND the comprehension level of New York Times reporters and editors, most of whom absolutely HATED MATH (just like public school teachers, by the way), but France is something like 80% Nuclear, the highest in the world (and without any major safety incidents, I might add).
Nuke power is base load. It simply CANNOT be turned down when load goes down, it takes days, if not weeks to lower the output of a nuke plant. So what happens? All that power that they STILL produce from their reactants ends up as heat and gets rejected locally. No different than light, as far as saving the world is concerned...it’s power. So, this is TOTALLY SYMBOLIC in that country - but hopefully, it won’t result in increased rapes due to cover of darkness, but I’m not optimistic.
France is a net exporter of power. All this will do is cause off peak electricity rates to go down for Spain. No less electricity will be consumed but the French will have to walk around in the dark.
It is true that Nuclear Power Plants are base load plants but it is not true that it takes days to lower out put. It can be lowered in a matter of minutes.
That being said Nuclear Power Plants are not good “Load Following” plants.
Varying power drastically over the course of a day makes it more difficult to control power.