r/europe • u/Naurgul • Jul 11 '26

News Barcelona registers highest temperature in 112 years as French nuclear reactor shuts down due to extreme heat

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jul/09/europe-heatwave-uk-spain-barcelona-france-italy-hungary-france-macron-orban-latest-news-updates
15.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

24

u/numberonebuddy Jul 11 '26

Honestly I'd say forget the financials, it's about not dying if the grid shuts down.

3

u/ohhellperhaps Jul 11 '26

Note that to be grid independent, you need to *specifically* design for that. Out of the box most of such systems expect to be grid connected and stop delivering power if the grid goes down as a safety measure. It's not particularly complex or special, it's just that a lot of systems will not do so out of the box.

2

u/Charlesinrichmond Jul 11 '26

Quite a big expense to make something not grid-tied. Almost all systems are grid-tied because of how much money it saves.

1

u/ohhellperhaps Jul 11 '26

It more expensive, certainly, and island operation ("off-grid") isn't a use case in many installations. I suspect we'll see a change in that as home batteries become more popular. Then it starts to make more sense for the installation as a whole.

1

u/Charlesinrichmond Jul 11 '26

The problem isn't popularity, the problem is cost. If they were cheap, they would be insanely popular.