Germany blew up two nuclear cooling towers and had a 700 MWh battery under construction four days later. France just set a regulatory floor to keep nuclear power on the grid even when nobody wants it.
While Germany decommissions plants and repurposes the sites for storage, France spent this summer cutting nuclear output by 4 to 6+ GW across repeated heatwaves, over a tenth of national demand at points, because rivers ran too warm to safely cool the reactors. That's happened in 2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026. But heat isn't the only thing France is throttling for. Solar capacity nearly doubled from 16 GW in 2022 to over 30 GW in 2025, and on sunny days generation now regularly exceeds what the grid needs once nuclear baseload is accounted for. The result: nearly 3 TWh of renewable power curtailed in 2025, almost double 2024, with solar taking the brunt of it.
Here's the protectionism part. In March 2026, France's energy regulator approved an agreement between grid operator RTE and EDF setting a minimum output level for nuclear generation. EDF keeps selling that output onto the day-ahead market "at any price," even when prices go negative, which they now do in over 90% of April days. So instead of flexing nuclear down when solar floods the grid at midday, France is flexing solar down to protect nuclear's market share. That's not a technical constraint. That's a policy choice to keep sunk-cost reactors running full tilt and make newer, cheaper generation absorb the cutbacks instead.
Compare the build economics on top of that. Gundremmingen's replacement battery: about 230 million euros, groundbreaking days after demolition, reusing existing grid infrastructure. France's EPR2 program: tens of billions of euros, over a decade of construction, and a track record of slipping deadlines going back to Flamanville. Germany bet on the option that gets built fast and gets out of its own way. France is spending both money and grid capacity defending an asset it already sunk the cost into.
Check out the full story https://interestingengineering.com/energy/germany-detonates-dead-nuclear-plant
China's utility-scale battery fleet has outgrown all other countries combined in 2025 Total battery capacity in China DOUBLED in 2025 with the addition of 189.5 GWh in “new energy storage”.
China’s 2025 power buildout was overwhelmingly storage- and renewables-led. CNESA says it added 66.43 GW / 189.48 GWh of new-type energy storage in 2025, while the EIA says nuclear added just 1.1 GW that year and 2.2 GW more through May 2026. At the same time, China added 315 GW of solar and 119 GW of wind in 2025, and wind plus solar reached 1.84 billion kW, or 47.3% of total installed capacity. That is a huge difference in scale and speed: batteries are being deployed fast enough to keep up with the renewable buildout, while nuclear is still moving in small increments.
On generation, the gap is just as stark. China’s renewable energy output reached about 4 trillion kWh in 2025, while China National Nuclear’s commercial nuclear generation was about 244.4 billion kWh, with 200.8 billion kWh from its operating units alone. That means renewables generated roughly 16 to 20 times more electricity than nuclear last year, depending on which nuclear figure you use. So when people say “capacity isn’t generation,” the answer is simple: yes, and the generation story still heavily favors renewables plus storage because that’s what is actually scaling the system.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-system-navigating-the-next-phase-of-chinas-battery-storage/
A few highlights from the article:
“Building nuclear for the first time in Australia would take longer and cost more than building offshore wind for the first time in Australia, according to modelling by Australia’s premier science agency that once again rules out nuclear power from any and all cost-efficient scenarios for a net zero grid.”
“CSIRO’s draft GenCost modelling continues to find that a combination of wind and solar with firming technologies is the best way forward on both costs and emissions reductions.
As Graham told the conference, ‘mainly using existing mature solar PV and onshore wind is preferred, and what that looks like from a cost perspective is that the mature technology scenario is the lowest cost scenario.’”
“As Graham told the conference, the numbers still well and truly rule out nuclear, while leaving offshore wind still ‘in the pocket’ as a potential part of Australia’s future generation mix.”