Monday, April 29, 2024

Vogon Today

Selected News from the Galaxy

Economic Scenarios

France and Blackout: Macron could pay the price

2 years ago babelfish

The French electricity grid is under pressure and the next cold spell could be devastating for the country as energy-intensive industrial sectors could suffer major cuts, report published by French grid operator Reseau de Transport d'Electricite ( RTE).

RTE said that due to the lack of wind and nuclear power generation, the next cold wave could be forced to cut electricity to energy-intensive companies to stabilize the grid. There is also the possibility that widespread two-hour rotating blackouts will be implemented to mitigate grid collapse during peaks in energy demand.

The good news is that the weather forecast models provided by Bloomberg do not show an impending cold spell for the first half of January, but the winter is still long.

"Based on the latest forecast for January, such weather events – including a severe cold wave – look very unlikely for the start of the month and less likely for the rest of the month," RTE said. "So, the risk of power outages is basically ruled out at least for the beginning of January."

Even if natural gas is now a little more abundant (and supplies should be resumed through Yamal) the tension remains, also because the French electricity production capacity has in any case suffered a cut and the closure of the German plants certainly does not help.

So the French grid remains under pressure, albeit not as badly as last week, when yesterday's electricity prices rose to their highest level since 2009. Now they remain high, but have halved.

The problem of France, or rather of Macron, is that they will vote in April, just out of a winter that risks seeing power cuts at the production level, but also at a private level. Obviously this issue will be central in the last months of the political discussion, and Macron is not in an optimal position. Macron's position is fragile, also because it enjoys only a very relative majority, around 26%, while the right, although divided, still has votes approaching 50%, divided between the three candidates Pecresse, Le Pen and Zemmour .

Macron, who tries to strenuously follow the Paris climate agreement, is seen as one of the causes of the crisis situation. So it could pay the political consequences.

Telegram
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles of Economic Scenarios.

⇒ Register now ⇐


Minds

The article France and Blackout: Macron could pay the price comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/francia-e-blackout-macron-potrebbe-pagarne-il-prezzo/ on Sun, 02 Jan 2022 07:00:20 +0000.