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Comment on At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind

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I can't see it from the article: are they talking about total generated energy or consumed?

In Spain our government has banned new nuclear plants, so we have to buy electricity from France, that produces it using nuclear plants anyway.

The high percentages of wind power is no wonder. There are a lot of generators installed.

> so we have to buy electricity from France

No, you're really wrong. Just have a look at our realtime demand & generation graphs: http://www.ree.es/operacion/curvas_demanda.asp (right side)

As I write this, it's 2h05 (15-nov).

We actually have some spare energy, and we only import energy when we expect spikes (mostly by night). Right now, we're using exactly 1% of imported energy (..who said from france?). Also, at 22h45 (14nov) we were exporting about 4% of our energy. And we exported between ~4% and ~3% of our energy on the 22h to midnight term.

Yesterday (14-nov) we used between 0.5% and 1% of imported energy between 21h and 22h. And between midnight and ~3h in the morning, we're expecting to import between 2% (that actually was at midnight) and 0.5% (for the next 4 hours).

By the way, there's a clear policy about new nuclear plants: avoided if we can (because we still have some spare energy). We rely on combined cycle (17% as I'm writing this), wind (18%) and nuclear (26%). So, nuclear is still here. But don't need more. And, what we import is pretty ridiculous (we export much more than we import).

... Hey, we have nice-looking, nifty graphics, with real-time data! Please, use them! :)

> so we have to buy electricity from France

Lie.

  Year	Electricity - imports (million kWh)
  2000	9000
  2001	11945
  2002	12166
  2003	7588
  2004	7588
  2005	9800
  2006	8700
  2007	8300
  2008	8773
  2009	8773

  Year	Electricity - exports (million kWh)
  2000	5600
  2001	6230
  2002	7832
  2003	4138
  2004	4138
  2005	4400
  2006	7500
  2007	11400
  2008	14520
  2009	14520
Source: Cia Factbook.

More: http://twitpic.com/5zscj/full And more: http://twitpic.com/5zxm3/full 2nd chart show how much % of Portuguese electricity is imported from Spain

Source: Red Electrica Española (Spanish grid operator)

France exports electricity to other countries such as Belgium and such (70k kWh last year)

Last link shows consuption, production, imports and exports of electricty in Spain: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=79&v=81&v=82...

Thank you for your eye-widening comment. It's surprising how we swallow "well known facts" as this (everybody pretends to know that we import energy from french nuclears), without any research.

The comment you answer wasn't mine, but it could have been. Thanks.

Interesting, I admit to have repeated what I've heard so many times without checking it.

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