Don't forget that France is heavily relying on German electricity. Especially in the winter time, France needs to shut down some nuclear power plants due to frozen rivers and but still needs electricity for heating. In the summer some nuclear power plants have to shut down as well because the rivers and thus the cooling water is too hot. In those times, Germany's reliable power sources help France to avoid major blackouts.
France only imported electricity from Germany in 2016 because a good part of the reactors had to be shutdown at the same time to investigate a dfect risk. But every other year it's Germany that buys France's electricity
This doesn't really matter because there needs only to be a single day where the nuclear power plants need shut down and France goes dark in a lot of places. Over the whole month France still seems to be a net exporter to Germany but Germany only buys French electricity because its cheap.
France cannot react to a fluctuating power demand like Germany can and Germany simply takes over the French excess power. You cannot power down a (French) nuclear plant as quick as you can spin up a (German) gas turbine. So Germany operates on a stable power source of less than they actually need and import from France but if more power is needed, Germany quickly spins up their gas turbines for the time it takes to power up the coal plants. France' power plants normally run at full power and if the demand falls off, they are in a bit of trouble and rely on Germany to help them out. Be it by taking over electricity (most of the time) or delivering electricity (sometimes).
If Germany didn't take the excess electricity, France would have to burn it off.
France imports in hot/dry summers when the rivers are overheating from cooling the nuclear powerplants. France imports in cold winters when their nuclear reactors are not sufficient to power the electrical heating for the homes...
> However, this takes off-line about 40 percent of Germany’s nuclear capacity and Germany is one of the two countries along Great Britain from which France imports electricity during the high-usage months in the summer. The reason importing electricity from Germany and the U.K. will be particularly important for France during a drought is because 24 of its 58 nuclear reactors do not have cooling towers and purely depend on the flow of river water to cool the reactor cores. What this means is that if the level of water in rivers drops, it means that some of the reactors may have to be shut down especially those on the Rhone River in southwest France, where temperatures are expected to be particularly high due to its geographical location.
> France was heavily dependent on power imports from Germany during the first cold spell of this winter, despite the fact that most of the country’s nuclear reactors are back online
I don't know, but I can't find anything that would support that statement. It is pretty normal that sometimes needs to buy some electricity - the European grid as a whole relies on it's interconnection. However, now - Germany has a ton of spare energy and it's evidently selling to everyone, except France... and it's winter
