The government has been repeating it for months: power outages are likely to occur this winter. But their impact might turn out to be more dramatic than expected. Christel Heydemann, Managing Director d’Orangewarned on Wednesday that the mobile network French might suffer cuts which will have a possible impact on “access to emergency number services”.
“It is illusory to imagine that in the event of load shedding, we will be able to maintain continuous service for all French people. Mobile services, if they are turned off in a geographic area for two hours, there will be no access to emergency number services for a time,” she said during a hearing before the Economic Affairs Commission of the Senate.
“Users will not be able to contact the emergency services”
In a circular from the Prime Minister Elisabeth Borneunveiled by our colleagues from Europe 1it also warns that “one of the consequences of the interruption of electrical distribution is that it will lead to interruptions in electronic communications (mobile and fixed telephony)”.
“In these perimeters, users will not be able to reach the emergency services (emergency call numbers 15, 17, 18, 115, 196)”, writes the head of government who hopes however that the call number of European emergency, 112, works because it is accessible regardless of the operator.
A “very last resort”
With the energy crisis, the possibility of “load shedding” this winter is frequently mentioned. These are targeted and temporary cuts in the supply intended to relieve the system in the event of excessive tension, with a different operation for the gaz et electricityand avoid the “black-out”, that is to say the generalized and uncontrolled breakdown, in the event of tensions between supply and demand.
This fear of cuts was revived following the latest forecasts from RTE, the high-voltage network manager, which warned in mid-November of a “high” risk of tensions on the electricity system in January, due to the slower restart than expected nuclear reactorsEDF. It is only as a “very last resort” that “load shedding” might be carried out by Enedis at the request of RTE.
Telephony, not a priority
“Control towers” for the security of the distribution network, the 28 regional management agencies of Enedis would then be responsible for activating these two-hour rotating blackouts remotely throughout the territory. Excluding some 14,000 priority sites determined by a decree dating back to July 5, 1990: defense, electricity production, but also hospitals, prisons.
“Unfortunately, the networks telecoms are not considered priority sites”, lamented Christel Heydemann, while mobile phones have become the main means of French to contact the emergency services and the emergency number 112.
