Several central districts of Paris were plunged into darkness Thursday, December 8 in the evening, after a massive power cut which affected up to 125,000 customers, due to a “technical problem” on a transformer, according to network managers Enedis and the Electricity Transmission Network (RTE).
Electricity was restored to most homes before midnight, it said. Images posted on social media by stunned Parisians showed streets with lampposts, red lights and buildings completely extinguished, with car headlights sometimes the only source of light.
This outage comes at a time when there has been much talk in France for a few days of possible temporary cuts, which would be decided in advance if the network were to become too tense due to the cold, while 18 of the 56 French nuclear reactors are still shut down for maintenance or repairs.
L’“damage” of Thursday, according to the term of the manager of the high voltage lines RTE, did not enter into this context. A “technical incident on an Enedis transformer” led to the cutting of a “radial”buried high voltage line of 225,000 volts, explained to Agence France-Presse (AFP) a spokesman for RTE.
Outages from a few seconds to 40 minutes
The 3e4e5e and 14e boroughs were affected, according to RTE and Enedis. Around midnight, several streets of the 5e and 14e boroughs were still concerned, indicated Enedis in its application “Enedis by my side”, evoking for certain streets a recovery at 1:30 a.m. or even 3 a.m. Around 12:30 a.m., most streets in 5e district were again lit, according to an AFP journalist.
Some 60,000 homes depending on the Gobelins power station were deprived of power only very briefly, some only for a few seconds. On the other hand, for 65,000 customers, dependent on the Cardinal-Lemoine station, it lasted between twenty and forty minutes, specifies RTE. A manual operation will still have to be carried out to restore the last homes cut during the night. Analyzes will be launched to determine the nature of the incident, adds RTE.
According to Enedis, the“incident occurred on the electrical network this [jeudi] evening at 10:15 p.m. in Paris”. “Thanks to technical maneuvers on the distribution network, almost all customers were resupplied in less than twenty minutes. The return to normal is expected in the evening.adds in its press release the manager of the distribution network, which like RTE “apologies for the inconvenience caused”.