Nogent-sur-Seine has two P'4 reactors, 1310MWe each, or 3930MWth (satané Karnaugh), for a total of 7860MWth. The values for a pair of EPR2 reactors are 1750MWe for one unit, 5250MWth, and 10.5GWth for two units.
The total heating requirement of Paris at peak demand in the middle of winter is 10GWth (for electric heating the only non-negligible inefficiency is inside the reactor itself, for gas and oil heating the energy inefficiencies are out of my scope here).
The question is this:
Can we 3x the available heating power to Paris during winter just by adding a trenched ~100km pipe from Nogent-sur-Seine to Paris?
This would reduce electric load on the grid a lot and make centralized heating systems much more economical.
In order to math it out, I need to know:
- Losses over distances
- Throughput
- How distribution works
- Speed of building networks
- Barriers to installation
- Efficiency of networks
- Install times and costs in relation to real estate age and type and ownership structure
- What are the needs for pumping and distribution stations
- Pressure regulation
- Regulations
- Need for redundancy
Germany has been much better than France at refurbishing it's buildings to improve their thermal insulation. However, energy consumption for heating has not changed sensibly. The reason being the rebound effect, like with everything: people get used to spending x per month, and they continue paying the same thing. They just heat their homes to a higher temperature.
- From an engineering standpoint, only looking at the house, a good thing: same energy consumption, better performance.
- From a political standpoint it is also good: better quality of life for the same price.
- From a systems perspective it is wasteful, because the labor / additional efficiency ratio is bad, it is very labor intensive to refurbish homes (another reason politicians like it) and from an ecological standpoint it's bad as well because the energy (oil and gas, or coal electricity) use has stayed flat instead of going down.
We can learn from their mistakes, and be much more labor efficient. We can reduce the cost of heating, instead of insulating individual homes.
End result from the individual perspective would be the same: spend the same, get more heat. This time because of more energy rather than better insulation but they won't be able to tell the difference.
- From the ecological point of view we'd be decarbonating the energy, so good.
- From the political standpoint this is job creation as well, but in a higher-class industry (nuclear vs BTP) and can be exported.
- From an economic point of view, this is a more efficient use of labor, as I only need to build the piping + the network, rather than add insulation to every building. (The insulation's lifespan is <= to that of the building, whereas the pipe + network stay usable with the future buildings)
- From a systems perspective this is very good: it's flexible, reusable, adaptable to future needs, (you can build the main pipes with the power of eventual future power plants that will replace the actual ones in mind, and build the rest of the network little by little. You can also connect the 2 reactors already there one by one, etc) and in particular it kickstarts a new industry: many industrial processes use high heat, and this (residential heating networks being comparatively low temperature, but the total system being very large scale) is a training run.
(also such a system can be used to cool living spaces in the summer, something just switching oil and gas boilers to electric radiators can't do)
Heating is 69% of residential energy consumtion, which is itself 28% of final energy use in the country, or 19.32% of total consumption, so solving this problem alone is 20% of the country's energy consumption (with pleasant secondary effects: it lightens the demand on the electrical system, it targets a use that is mainly fossil, it participates in the series effect of nuclear, etc).