While the Government unveiled the first elements of its crisis plan in case of power outages this winter, Olivier Véran, government spokesman, wanted to be reassuring this Thursday by putting the French before their responsibilities.
“We are not announcing to the French that there will be cuts. In December it will not happen. But what we are saying is that in January, we still don’t know what the state of the winter will be. In the situation where we have a particularly cold winter, so both especially expensive in energy and given the difficulties of nuclear power plants, there could be situations of tension in the power lines, and since we are excluded from running the risk of a blackout (a general outage, editor’s note), we prepare all the scenarios for face all situations”, he explains on BFMTV-RMC.
“Temporary outages in some places”
And propose an anticipation strategy with, for example, the Ecowatt device that allows the French to know the state of tensions in the network.
“There will be no unexpected cuts, we are able to anticipate,” continues the spokesperson. During a risk situation, the French will be warned several times the day before (at 5 am and 5 pm, in particular through television messages).
little effort
“In the case of red Ecowatt, we cannot rule out that the next day it may have difficulties on certain lines. In that case, the French will be asked to adapt their consumption. We could find ourselves in situations that require a cut for one hour for two hours of electricity in some places”, explains Olivier Véran.
“The message you need to hear is not ‘there will be no more juice,’ it’s ‘we need you to make a little effort. If at 7 pm, everyone doesn’t turn on their cooking plate at the same time or everyone doesn’t dry their hair at the same time , if we move a little, it’s okay, on the other hand, if there is no behavioral adaptation, we do not exclude finding voltages on the line that could justify cutting off the power for a certain time by warning, and that’s not all the world. We have the ability together to prevent that from happening.”
Did the French hear the message? Not really. RTE specifies that the drop in electricity consumption observed for several weeks is mainly due to the drop in production in industry, household eco-funds would have allowed them to save only 1%.
Source: BFM TV
