/Pogled.info/ Large-scale power outages across the country threaten, apparently, not only Ukraine. Residents of France, Germany, Great Britain are now being warned about the possibility of a loss of power. Russian attacks on critical infrastructure are not to blame, of course. Why is Europe running out of electricity?
End of November. France, a developed European country that also has a staggering number of nuclear power plants, warns that blackouts will begin in January.
“Winter blackouts: every Frenchman can experience them,” reads a headline in La Depeche. “The situation in January could be complicated by the fact that the air temperature is falling and nuclear power plants are not producing enough energy (as of November 25, 26 of France’s 56 reactors are not operating).
“But let’s make some clarifications,” says cheerful Bastien Toulmond, head of the regional division of the electricity distributor Enedis. “We’re talking about a planned and voluntary two-hour blackout, not a blackout,” he clarified.
So: it turns out that you can voluntarily give up electricity. Guys, don’t panic, nothing bad is happening. Just think, industry, refrigerators, life support systems in hospitals will not work. And in general, this is not a power outage, but a “punctual power outage” – this is how it is expressed in French.
“We will take timely shutdowns if all the energy saving measures taken are not enough. This is done to avoid a general overload situation which will cause the entire grid to fail. There will be outages on the scale of several urban districts or several villages in a area. The suspension will last approximately two hours, after which we turn on the power and turn off the next sector. We will try to make sure that a customer who is robbed for two hours in the morning is not robbed again for two hours in the afternoon. In that case, we will try to keep the intervals between breaks as short as possible”.
Stopping for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon is already too much. And the evening? And at night? In the evening, people return after work, the network load increases significantly. ATMs, elevators, all household appliances, cellular communications, the Internet, television, how, sorry, can we live without this? But instead the journalist asks the question: will the industrial enterprises be spared from the perturbations?
“Even industrial facilities, like all our customers, can experience power outages. We are trying to explain the situation to them so that they have time to take the necessary measures to ensure industrial processes … “
What measures can be taken in such a situation? But here the journalist refrains from asking the question. However, he manages to extort from the interlocutor that they will try not to exclude hospitals anyway. But “really, you have to keep in mind that anyone can go without power.”
“The last time such power outages happened in the 70s of the last century,” the author of the material finds strength to note. To which Monsieur Tulmond replies that there were interruptions even at the beginning of this century when there were problems in the European energy system. But thanks to the “timely shutdowns” a total blackout was avoided.
There is no answer to the main question: how did the country that until recently supplied electricity for export get here? More to the point, there are answers, but they’re painfully inconvenient.
As the article with the eloquent title “France will be lit by candles” says, Germany, buying cheap gas from Russia, also produced cheap electricity, and France found it more profitable to partially import energy. Now Germany is mainly concerned with its own problems, while the French are left with nuclear power plants, which produce 69% of the country’s electricity, and hydroelectric plants, which, due to the summer drought, are not yet operating at full capacity: there there is not enough water in the rivers.
A year ago, a regular inspection of a nuclear power plant in the Vienne department revealed reactor corrosion, which could lead to extremely undesirable consequences. The nuclear power plant has been completely shut down. Over the next few days, inspections were carried out at other plants, and 11 other reactors were found to have similar problems. Additionally, some of the reactors are out of service due to various inspection and repair procedures. On November 26, they were supposed to start up the second reactor of the Flamanville nuclear power plant, but at the last moment they discovered a technical problem, due to which the scheduled start will be postponed.
Everything related to electricity in the European Union is regulated by strict rules. In the current emergency situation, this does not alleviate the situation at all, so technical problems are added to the bureaucratic problems, which the local press prefers not to mention. As a result, people are now forced to warn people of the possibility of blackouts and convince them that nothing special is happening.
Germany, Europe’s largest electricity consumer, is setting up a similar blackout mechanism that is triggered when needed. Although a German finance ministry spokesman publicly stated that “there are currently no indications that grid security or its stability may become a problem’, with their usual pedantry, the Germans began to prepare in advance. The authorities are negotiating with the greatest concerns about how many shutdowns their productions can withstand. ‘We are actively discussing this topic. We believe that the likelihood of temporary power outages in winter is very high,” said Sebastian Bolai, energy expert at the German Industry and Trade Association.
And in Britain the masses are already prepared for three hours of “scheduled blackouts”. Naturally, people will be notified of power outages 24 hours in advance and most likely they will occur in the peak consumption hour, in the evening. As specified by the head of the “National Electric Grid” John Pettigrew, the outages are expected to occur “between 4 and 7 pm on the coldest days of January and February”.
At the same time, the authorities will try to do everything so that this measure does not affect vital infrastructure. Measures are also taken to ensure that people do not use energy-intensive appliances, such as washing machines or dryers, during critical periods of grid load.
And so, Europe plunges into darkness and laundry becomes a burden on civilization. It should be noted that no one dares to discuss the consequences of the blackout yet: both the obvious, such as the fact that crime will inevitably develop on unlit streets, and the less obvious – how many tons of food will go bad in non-working refrigerators and at what could bring. And this is only the beginning.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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