The French nuclear fleet is weakening. This week, 17 of the 56 reactors are closed, compared to 14 last week. And the trend is not expected to improve, as EDF plans to carry out long-term maintenance starting in the spring, which will result in the closure of new reactors. In summer the bar of 20 shutdown reactors will already be exceeded, which will force France to buy electricity abroad.
On the dam side, the fill rate rises to 51% this week, slightly below the usual averages. If the situation is not yet worrying, the lack of rain (more than 32 days without rain, historical record) could be a real problem in the coming weeks.
The risk of tensions in the electrical network for the remainder of winter has, however, gone from “medium” to “low”, according to the manager of the high and very high voltage network RTE, which further removes the risk of power outages in France. “The mid-February late-winter update confirms the diagnosis of recent months: the risk related to the security of electricity supply is now practically eliminated,” RTE estimated last week.
Gas stocks 46% full
No special difficulty in gas stocks, 46% full. “We were able to get through this winter in satisfactory conditions,” Engie boss Catherine MacGregor explained last week to the figaro.
He also believes that “we will succeed” in “spending next winter”, from 2023 to 2024, and specifies that this “does not mean that we should relax our efforts because Russian volumes have effectively withdrawn from world gas production, so We will have to continue to be careful.”
Source: BFM TV
