The EDF strikers carried out this Thursday important reductions in the charges on the means of electricity production, even reaching, according to the CGT, a “level never reached” since the beginning of the movement against the pension reform project . Some “22,258 MW (megawatts, editor’s note) subtracted from the network, a level never before reached” that “represents more than a third of instantaneous consumption,” the union said in a press release.
For its part, EDF indicated that at 08:00 it had observed 13,790 MW of load drops in the first quarter of the day, which led the administrator of the high-voltage lines RTE, guarantor of network security, to Issue a security message for two network hours to limit load drops.
RTE may send safety messages to strikers if it believes production reductions risk cuts to users. So it’s up to the employees to respect them. “At 3:30 p.m., the load drop in our means of production is 15,810 MW: 3,300 MW of nuclear, 4,680 MW of thermal combustion and 7,830 MW of power loss available in the hydraulic park,” adds EDF. Nuclear reactors produce between 900 and 1450 MW.
Power outages in Toulouse
On January 19, during the first day of action, the drop in production had reached 7,000 MW according to the CGT and 5,000 according to management. On March 7, the nuclear fleet had registered a cumulative load drop of 14,900 MW and the power available in the dams was reduced by 7,000 MW, according to EDF. EDF identified 31.8% of the strikers at the end of the day Thursday compared to 27.4% on March 15.
Two power cuts also affected nearly 100,000 customers in Toulouse this Thursday, as well as the traffic lights in the city center, in full demonstration that was marked at the end of the afternoon by acts of violence, garbage fires and some canopies of looted bus.
“These are malicious acts, savage cuts, so we are going to file a complaint,” a representative of Enedis management told AFP about these cuts.
Source: BFM TV
