This Friday promises to be a decisive day for the French electricity grid, for two reasons. First of all, the first winter Ecowatt orange alert could be activated on Monday, which will combine low temperatures and a high level of consumption, generating tensions in the electrical network. On the other hand, RTE and Enedis will carry out a nationwide test to simulate the load shedding operations that could occur during the winter.
If these voluntary and organized cuts throughout the national territory are not ruled out as a last resort in the event of high voltage in the electrical network, the risk of cut is completely null according to RTE. The person in charge of the electricity transmission network has affirmed this since the beginning of the school year: “France is in no way at risk of a ‘blackout’, that is, of total loss of control of the electrical system. RTE has backup resources from the appropriate and proportionate electrical system depending on the magnitude of any imbalance.
An energy deficit limited to 1% in the worst scenario
Concretely, even a maximum accumulation of the various negative hazards could not bring France into a blackout situation. The worst situation would consist of a particularly cold climate, such as during the winter of 2010-2011, to which would be added a degraded scenario on several levels with an energy sobriety plan with insufficient effects, a gas shortage in Europe that would affect the power of operation plants and imports of electricity or a context of extremely degraded nuclear production. “In this scenario, the energy deficit would be a maximum of 1% on a winter scale,” estimates RTE.
The operator of the electricity transmission network therefore insists on the low volumes potentially cut off during the winter and that cannot constitute a situation of generalized shortage or blackout. Upstream of the 1% ratio corresponding to the downgraded scenario, the central scenario of the RTE study evokes a volume of undistributed electricity that represents around 0.1% of consumption between October and March, that is, 0.3 TWh.
Multiple levers even before a single load shed
Not only is blackout unthinkable in the current state, but load shedding itself might not occur under certain conditions. The load shedding plan is precisely “a procedure of last resort and activated to avoid the collapse of the system (“black-out”). But even before reaching the implementation of these two-hour blackouts distributed throughout the territory on a rotating basis, RTE has several backup means. As a reminder, RTE establishes a collective effort necessary to avoid the use of load shedding which is less than 5% in most cases of Ecowatt red signal but can reach 15% if weather conditions are extreme.
First, large industrial sites could be asked to erase a certain volume of consumption under the interruptibility system. The second lever is the reduction of approximately 5% of the voltage in the public distribution networks that can save 3 to 4 GW in a few hours by targeting certain electrical appliances such as heating, lighting or hobs. In d’autres termes, la France n’est pas prête de renouer avec le black-out, pres de 44 ans après le dernier episode en date qui avait touché pratiquement tout l’Hexagone à la suite d’un incident dans l’est From the country.
Source: BFM TV
