The French government has announced its plans to carry out power cuts in the event of a lack of supply this winter. They would affect certain areas of the country on a rotating basis at peak consumption hours, in total 60% of the French population.

France does not rule out that this winter there will have to be power outages and for this reason, the Government of Emmanuel Macron has prepared an emergency plan to publicize how these power outages will be organized.

The Executive has already sent the circular to the Government delegates in the departments to prepare the territories and establish the way in which the different cuts will be made.

The government spokesman, Olivier Véran , in a statement to the BFM television channel, assured “we are not announcing that there will be cuts”, and then pointed out that “there could be situations of tension in the electricity supply”. Véran linked the possibility of making cuts to the evolution of weather conditions in the country: “If we have a particularly cold January, we cannot exclude cuts”.

The possible power outages would last for a maximum of two hours, only during peak consumption hours, which in France are from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., government sources indicated.

These power outages would not affect any department completely, so that their impact is not concentrated at any one point and thus distribute their negative impact.

According to the plans, many critical services and infrastructures would be protected such as hospitals, fire stations or gendarmerie , so 40% of the French population would be safe from possible cuts since they share the same priority power lines with those facilities. This means that the cuts could affect 60% of the population, but never all at the same time, but would be in some areas, none of which would suffer them repeatedly. On the other hand, the Executive confirmed that the areas that are going to be affected by the cuts would be notified sufficiently in advance so that they could be adequately prepared.

limit consumption

Although they warn that the cuts will not be inevitable, they could be canceled even at the last minute if demand is finally lower than expected. Therefore, reducing consumption will be especially important in these periods.

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