France cannot currently meet its electricity needs on its own.
(Photo: dpa)
Paris The French government has drawn up an emergency plan for power supply in winter. France’s Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne had convened a crisis team to prevent a catastrophe in the coming months. A blackout is ruled out. France is nevertheless preparing for shortages in the power supply. Government spokesman Olivier Véran speaks of “extraordinary measures as a last resort”.
The French government fears that some of the power generation could not be sufficient during a cold winter in January. The reason for the supply bottlenecks is the delayed maintenance of many nuclear reactors. France must therefore prepare for a controlled interruption of the supply of two hours. It is said to be local power outages that affect small areas and not entire cities or an entire department.
According to the plan, the electricity could be interrupted between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. or between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. In this case, the population would be alerted via the central Ecowatt warning app. Hospitals and other important facilities such as the fire brigade and police should be spared.
Those who live near an important facility and are supplied by the same power line can hope to continue to have electricity: The outages could affect 60 percent of consumers across the country, but only 20 percent in Paris.
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Internet and telephones do not work in the event of a failure, trains and subways should not run. Schools are said to remain closed when power is cut off in an area. It is still questionable whether the central emergency number 112 will still be available.
Still too few nuclear power plants in use
The situation in the French nuclear power plants is still tense. At the end of November, 21 of the 56 nuclear reactors were not running. Maintenance work, corrosion problems, the pandemic and strikes have slowed down the French energy company EDF. Eleven piles are to be reopened in December. The French network operator RTE expects that this could drag on into January.
Paris expects power supply bottlenecks.
(Photo: AP)
The remaining reactors should be back online by February. EDF has been behind the plan from mid-September for a long time: According to this, only nine reactors should not be running at the moment.
>> Read here: France is ramping up its nuclear power plants again – and wants to speed up the construction of new reactors
In addition to the weather and progress with nuclear power plants, much depends on France’s neighbors when it comes to the electricity supply. The country has to buy electricity from European partners, including Germany and Belgium in particular, but also Spain and Great Britain. France has just signed a solidarity agreement with Germany. Germany supplies electricity to France and France supplies gas to Germany.
However, the capacities for this are not unlimited, but depend on the supply situation in Germany. According to RTE boss Xavier Piechaczyk, there could be more than 10 outages in winter if the nuclear reactors are not started up and it gets particularly cold. If it stays warmer, up to six failures cannot be ruled out.
France’s dependency on other countries for electricity has never been so high. The number of days on which electricity was imported from other countries increased from 17 in 2018 to 220 this year by the end of November alone. Before that, France was a major exporter of electricity. In 2014 and 2015, no electricity was introduced at all.
More: Gas against electricity – Germany is now receiving gas from France