In the streets of Lille, December 3, 2023 (AFP / Sameer Al-DOUMY)
“We are forecasting a peak for this week which will take place on Wednesday morning at 83 gigawatts and which will be covered by French electricity production,” detailed the director of operations at RTE, Arnaud Mazingue, on BFM Business this Monday January 8.
France begins the year 2024 with a cold episode that started on Sunday January 7 and which will intensify until Tuesday. The forecast negative temperatures have pushed certain prefectures, including that of Ile-de-France, to
activate their “Big Cold” plan.
Tuesday is expected to be the coldest, with negative temperatures in the morning across almost the entire country:
-5°C in Belfort, -3 in Lille, -2 in Paris, Bordeaux and Rennes,
0 in Lyon and Toulouse…
But then, should we fear power cuts? The director of operations at RTE, Arnaud Mazingue, wanted to be reassuring this Monday on
BFM Business.
“Everything is fine”,
he promised, “despite the resumption of economic activity” and “temperatures below seasonal norms”. “We are forecasting a peak for this week which will take place on Wednesday morning
to the tune of 83 gigawatts
and which will be covered by French electricity production.
We do not issue an alert”,
he assured.
“We planned to be in balance:
neither import nor export” of electricity
towards neighboring countries, continued Arnaud Mazingue, according to our colleagues. Then to cite the cases where “we would request our import capacities”: if “the temperatures would be a little different from those forecast by Météo France” or if the winds are “a little weaker than expected”.
Same story with the Minister of Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher. Guest on
France Info
this Monday, she also assured that
“Everything is going to be fine.”
“We have a lot of electricity that we produce and
we have so many that we export
and that we reached an export record at the end of December”, she added, further specifying that
“we have gas in our storage”.
“We have collectively reduced our gas and electricity consumption,” the minister also recalled, encouraging households to
“continue to turn the heating on to 19 degrees”.