SBarring exceptionally good weather conditions, France will run out of electricity from next winter, due to the problems encountered by its nuclear fleet and the gas crisis, accentuated by the war in Ukraine.
By adding our controllable electricity production capacities [produire de l’électricité en fonction de la demande], i.e. approximately 65 gigawatts (GW), the 13 GW of import capacities (if our neighbors can supply us) and 3.6 GW of “curtailment capacities” (i.e. anticipation or postponement of consumption during peak periods), we arrive at 82 GW. While it would take 100 GW to pass the winter peak.
Twenty-nine of our nuclear reactors out of 56 are shut down (maintenance, “large fairing” [programme de renforcement des installations nucléaires] and corrosion on welds); 9 GW of controllable means of production have been closed over the past decade: the Fessenheim nuclear power plant (1.8 GW), the coal-fired power plants in Le Havre and Gardanne, the fuel-fired power plants. Admittedly, we have developed wind power, but its availability drops to 5% in the event of weak winds. And after 7 p.m. in winter, the solar no longer produces…
Efficiency and sobriety as compasses
What to do ? Shift maintenance schedules? EDF has already announced, at the beginning of June, to postpone the shutdown of seven reactors, scheduled for next winter, and plans to delay that of an eighth. Working hard to meet the commissioning schedule for the European pressurized nuclear reactor (EPR) in Flamanville, which should take place in the second quarter of 2023? Yes, of course, but without effect on the deadline for next winter.
We will therefore also have to act on the demand side, with efficiency and sobriety as compasses; but also with agility. For it is in more flexible consumption that the least costly and most immediate reservoir of capacity is to be found.
Our load shedding capacities, which amounted to almost 10 GW at the start of 2000, are now only 3.6 GW: 2 GW with large industrialists, remunerated if they stop their consumption on instructions from the Transport network electricity (RTE) when the latter needs it to balance supply and demand; 0.85 GW piloted by Enedis on the same principle with smaller manufacturers; 0.6 GW corresponding to offers of the peak hours/off-peak hours type (EJP, Tempo) offered to individuals to encourage them, through variable tariffs, not to consume on busy days; and finally 0.15 GW by load shedding operators, such as Voltalis, who install boxes blocking certain devices on an ad hoc basis, against payment. We can add the Ecowatt device, piloted by RTE and the Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), and activated on days of very high tension in the form of appeals to citizens to they voluntarily deviate from certain uses.
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