I’m curious to know how your experience with Optaplanner has been. As I understand you model your problems quite differently and it is more of a search for a good enough solution using metaheuristics?
Obviously not? Just because France doesn't buy natural gas themselves, they import so much electricity based on natural gas from its neighbors. So they are defacto dependent on natural gas as they can't supply electricity enough with nuclear and are thus in such much much worse energy political situation as prices will continue to surge.