If, at the beginning of last June, Emmanuel Macron declared that there was “no risk of power cuts next winter”, this optimistic scenario defended by the President of the Republic is moving away. Indeed, his government has been mobilized for several days to prepare the country for a winter which promises to be strewn with cuts, according to the rigorous temperatures and the overloads of the electricity network, which will struggle to cope with increases in consumption.
In this context, energy sobriety and the famous eco-gestures take on a much more concrete meaning. To steer this policy, a tool is at the heart of all discussions: EcoWatt, the electricity weather forecast.
It is this system created by RTE (Electricity transport network) which must alert the population of the tensions encountered on the network, calling on them to adopt more reasoned consumption according to a traffic light concept: green, the situation is normal; orange, eco-gestures are to be taken; red, cuts are inevitable without a significant drop in consumption.
Recently brought up to date, the platform was treated to a brand new application at the end of October, launched with a communication campaign making the French aware of this issue and inviting them to download the application to activate localized alerts. Because without an alert, the whole system loses its usefulness. However, we learn that the interest shown by the population in EcoWatt is quite relative.
Only 300,000 downloads
Indeed, Xavier Piechaczyk, chairman of the executive board of RTE, explained Thursday, December 1 on FranceInfo that the application had been downloaded around 300,000 times while EcoWatt has around 470,000 subscribers to SMS alerts. The leader acknowledged that it was not “not enough” and that we had to continue “to advertise”. Disappointing figures, and above all too low to allow the device to have a real impact.
However, if panic is not in order for Xavier Piechaczyk, it is also because the system will be supplemented by daily information for the French through other channels, such as the weather reports from television channels or even dedicated pages on the country’s major news websites. The government will also hold regular meetings to take stock of the situation.
As Olivier Véran, government spokesperson, said, any cuts will be announced the day before between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. The French will then be able, via EcoWatt, to enter their address and check if their home is part of a district which will be the victim of “shedding”, according to the established term. Power cuts that will not exceed 2 hours and cannot occur twice in a row in the same place.
10 GW of eco-gestures expected peak
“If at 7 p.m., everyone doesn’t turn on their hob at the same time, don’t dry their hair at the same time, if we shift a little […] the risk of cuts will be reduced”specifies the spokesperson, who relies on national solidarity and insists: “We are preparing, but we are not announcing to the French that there will necessarily be cuts”. In its forecasts, RTE hopes that a generalized EcoWatt red signal could lead to a reduction in electricity consumption of around 10 GW at peak, which is significant. In comparison, the shedding of energy-intensive industrialists – paid for these cuts – would save 1.2 GW (and would cost a few tens of millions of euros).
The lack of interest of the French for EcoWatt is reminiscent of the initial failure of the StopCovid application, on the ashes of which TousAntiCovid was subsequently designed. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government ended up readjusting the situation by giving real interest to its application. And it was because it allowed people to keep their exit permits and then their certificates for the health pass that they ended up finding their place on the smartphones of millions of citizens. We can therefore imagine that if tomorrow power cuts were to multiply in practice, EcoWatt would experience a new boom.
Much more polluting electricity today
This tense situation can be explained by a combination of unfavorable factors, which range from the temporary low availability of the French nuclear fleet (most of the time due to maintenance) to disruptions in the energy market caused by the war in Ukraine and the reduction in Russian gas supplies. And this is obviously very bad news for the environment, because what low-carbon electricity production methods do not produce must be compensated for by production methods that are harmful to the environment.
Indeed, the energy produced and consumed in France for a few days is much more polluting, with gas power stations running at full speed (supplied with liquefied natural gas, often purchased from Russia and transported not by pipeline, but by boat ) and the relaunched Saint-Avold coal-fired power plant in Moselle (a mode of production which also generates high atmospheric pollution). We also import electricity produced by our neighbours, often using fossil fuels.
This reminds us that energy savings, whatever they are, are always good to take from an ecological point of view. As such, sobriety will — without a doubt — become a long-term imperative, including in France, where electricity is one of the most carbon-free in the world, when the nuclear fleet and totally usable. That said, relying primarily on citizen solidarity will never be enough and ambitious government measures targeting all the levers are expected, as the inconsistencies (and unnecessary waste) persist to this day.